MAMA (2025) ‘Hot Docs’ Movie Review: Wrenching and Unflinchingly Frank Portrait of Moving Through Illness

Ana Cristina Benítez’s “MAMA” (2025) searches deep into her recesses in the wake of her late-stage breast cancer diagnosis. Just back from a trip, the 36-year-old Ana is carted into the most unexpected life, rife with chemotherapies and drastic upheavals. Everything she’s known about life becomes vulnerable, testy, and fraught. She takes a camera and begins to record everything that’s happening to her.

This is honest, wrenching work from Benítez. When she says she wants to turn the camera on herself in all her growing discomfort, “MAMA” never doubles down on it or renders that as a diminutive, trifling, empty assertion. Her body is changing, and she never cuts away from the ‘uglier’ abscesses of the chemotherapy. There are many times when doctors and authorities state she can’t bring the camera in; she keeps pushing back. Through it all, the camera remains a constant friend, testament to the varied, tumultuous shifts in her life. There’s a vastness of love she receives from her parents, but they can never be enough to offset the harrowing vicissitudes, the specificity of her experience.

For her, filming is a way to try and approach the unfamiliar, the alien, with comprehension. It’s an attempt to grapple with the unknown, turn it into something legible, and which she can marshal it into coherence and proactive growth. This harks back to her childhood, when her father went away to the US for work. She had then been filming snippets of everyday life, her siblings, capturing it for his sake. After a pause of many years, when cancer hits her, she returns to filming. But there are also gaps and gulfs. “Images aren’t enough to express all that I feel”, she underlines where the camera doesn’t reach, what it fails to tap.

Benítez struggles with fitting in. Being at the precipice of death, how can she coolly talk about life’s many delights and surprises? There’s a sharp, unnerving dissonance she experiences between her circumstances and being a person engaging in sociality. Being a cancer patient already casts her into another space, wherefrom she’s at unease to live life as she once used to. She has to re-negotiate a new understanding of her body, learn what it’s now comfortable with, without the burden of past routines and expectations.

For all the terrifying, nerve-racking uncertainties “MAMA” plumbs, it’s firmly, ultimately turned towards a reassuring sense of spiritual regeneration. Even if the body drifts off the cliff, the self has to have its own resolute, inner strength, a fortitude of the soul that breaks past any physical see-saw. It’s that which Benítez is yearning for, propping her up against the ramming oscillation between better health and relapse.

Tracing an inner journey riddled with fear and doubt, “MAMA” is a work of patient, magnanimous understanding. Stricken with such an illness, one’s relationship to life undergoes a dramatic shift. Equations one has with others stand to be tested. Around her, at the hospital, there are forbidding, despairing examples of other patients. We are told that when it’s men who are diagnosed with cancer, their wives stick through, but things are quite different in the matter of a reversal.

One of the other female patients discovered their husband’s infidelity. The illness brings with it not just extreme physical pain but abandonment, the snapping of an enthused relationship between the self and the outer world. One always feels peculiarly distanced from everyone, hurled askew. This can engender waves of despondency, leaving one emotionally hollowed out. The struggle for connection becomes an ordeal, as demanding as the physical fallout of the illness itself.

Much of “MAMA” dips into Ana’s relationship with her partner, Mateo, as well as her family. With Mateo, inhabiting life isn’t clear-cut. There are all sorts of rugged curves and stormy delineations. Reckonings have to be confronted frequently. It’s vital for the health of the relationship. It seems to end as well as see a revival. Her family embraces her, nurtures her, sheaths her with all the care that’s possible. “MAMA” is a reaffirming portrait of healing, staving off misery and desolation. Beneath the tussle, there’s grace to be found. Overall, “MAMA” is a hymn to life, being resilient and aware of the gifts in oneself amidst unimaginable agony.

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MAMA premiered at the Hot Docs Film Festival 2025.

MAMA (2025) Movie Link: HotDocs