Salvador Espinosa’s directorial “The Dad Quest” (Original title: Lo mejor del mundo, 2025) folds up early in the game. As you’d have guessed from the title, it’s about parenthood and has something to do with children and the ties with them. But whether it’s fleshed with any dimension or texture is lost on the viewer. This is a film that serves you pretty terribly if there are expectations. Even if there’s none, it’s so meandering and pointlessly elongated at a slim runtime that questions emerge as to why the film was mounted, who thought it was a good idea to bankroll it with such a thin script, and why it has the most sloppily designed situations. Characters are dunked for bizarre reasons, and emotional continuity is severed from the real world, though the latter is depicted frequently as an intervening force.
The more you think about the film, the more it’ll make you incensed and irate about why the mother has to be plonked off to trigger the father’s dawning of responsibility and paternal love. Couldn’t the two go hand in hand? Something is troubling here, revealing an unsettling insensitivity on the part of the makers who felt such a skewed need to prop up one parent at the expense of another.
The Dad Quest (Lo mejor del mundo, 2025) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
What Happens When a Distant Father Learns the Son He’s Raising Isn’t His?
Gallo has been an absent father. He buries himself in his career, which has to do with directing a reality TV show. He stays wholly absorbed in it, and it takes a sudden call from his estranged wife, Alicia, asking him to pick up their son, Benito, from school. She’d be engaged somewhere. But he himself is dazed and needs picking up first, which she does.
Getting back to his life in Mexico, he is about to miss picking up his son when his wife reminds him. Unfortunately, he needs some time to get used to the responsibility of his own son. When Gallo and Alicia meet for dinner later, she tells him of an offer. She will have to move with Benito to Madrid for her new job. He responds nonchalantly, rightly exasperating her. Couldn’t he act more concerned that his son is moving so far away? Perturbed, she storms out of the restaurant and is hit by a car, instantly dying.
This puts Gallo in a forced position of being a parent. However, a thought nags him. At the dinner, Alicia had suggested he might not be Benito’s biological father. It spurs Gallo into doing a paternity test, and the results show that Benito’s and his DNA don’t match. Significant unease creeps up, and he tells Benito his discovery. The grandmother, who’s the one looking after Benito’s daily needs and schooling, is kept in the dark on Benito’s request. The son now wants to find out his true biological father’s identity and seeks Gallo’s aid.
Will Gallo Choose Career or Fatherhood?
The two decide to rummage through Alicia’s phone, breaking in and riffling through her messages for probable clues. This leads them down a string of encounters with various men in supposedly funny situations. There’s a painter whose muse was Alicia. He instantly denies any sexual intimacy with her and gets outraged. Then they meet another guy whose connection reveals itself as not the one they are looking for. The two keep running into dead ends and red herrings.
Diana, Alicia’s friend, joins them in the pursuit. She’s only happy to be of any help. But her character remains more of an afterthought, barely registering and just about functional. They go to Alicia’s therapist, who they suspect she had a fling with. However, that too doesn’t transpire as expected. Amidst all of these, Gallo gets a call from the studio that his TV show has been cancelled. Anxious, he abandons the pursuit and tries to go back to Miami in search of a job. However, an encounter with a friend triggers a much-needed realisation about priorities, and he gets back to Benito.
The Dad Quest (Lo mejor del mundo, 2025) Movie Ending Explained:
Does Benito find his real dad?
Finally, there’s a guy at the agency where Alicia worked, Enrique, and they decide to meet. At the party, they meet him, and Benito walks up to him to do his digging. The viewer isn’t part of this exchange. Gallo has almost resigned himself to his not being able to be the dad of Benito while feeling the ultimate gush of parental love. He walks back to his car. He’s about to drive away when Benito comes running, followed by Diana. Benito decides to look for his biological dad. It’s a sweet, happy reconciliation between Gallo and Benito as the two finally settle on the parent-child equation that had seemed so elusive.
The Dad Quest (Lo mejor del mundo, 2025) Movie Review
It’s bizarre to watch a film that’s so messed up in its priorities. It has no direction or purpose as to how it should arrange itself or whether to orchestrate characters in complex rhythms of push-pull. It’s so lacking and fleeting and shallow that you can never forge any emotional connection despite the overtures at cranking up emotion. Parent-child equations, the thawing in them, make for easily heart-tugging material, but it’s amiss here. It becomes integral to why you don’t feel a shred of emotion for the characters, flimsy as they are. Randomly, the dead mother’s best friend assumes a key role, accompanying Gallo and Benito on the journey. But you don’t know any more about this friend, neither does this relationship expand on an understanding of Alicia. She’s wholly consigned to oblivion.
A series of terribly contrived scenarios ensues, each with a supposed biological father and turning out predictably as wrongly assumed. As it progresses, the relationship between Gallo and Benito deepens, as each begins to lean on the other and edge toward decisive acceptance. However, the film fails to lace these situations with genuine emotion and character-driven moments of enduring truth. Truthfully, they are just flubbed out by generic, slapdash writing that trades in one scenario after another and mines no grounded realisation from them.
