‘Cielo’ Review: A Swallowed Goldfish Sparks a Morbidly Magical Journey Through the Infinite Possibilities of Childhood

The idyllic opening images of Alberto Sciamma’s “Cielo” would never lead you to suspect the morbidity that comes mere seconds later. The shots of a tranquil alpine lake with crystal-clear water and an adorable girl (Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda) playing on the shore appear designed to set up something ripped straight from a fairytale. And in a way, they are… but said fairytale starts with said girl swallowing a live goldfish before beating her father to death with a large rock.

The scene isn’t excessively played for shock value or tragedy. Ditto for the subsequent scene of young Santa stabbing her mother to death. Both moments are treated as mere inevitabilities that must be navigated before we can get to the good stuff. It’s an important distinction to internalize if you want to understand anything else that happens in Sciamma’s lovely work of magical realism.

In “Cielo,” life and death exist on an infinite spectrum, with transitions between the two serving more as a logistical matter than anything truly existential. Santa kills her mother (who fully signed off on the plan in advance) as a means of transporting her out of her life of poverty in rural Bolivia and escorting her into Heaven. The eight-year-old is very clear about death being the first step, but we get a feature film out of the fact that she’s murkier about the rest of the details.

Fortunately, she encounters plenty of friendly faces who are willing to help her around the way. Santa’s open-ended journey sees her dragging her mother’s (at least temporarily) dead body through deserts, salt flats, lakes, churches, and small-town wrestling matches in search of a transcendent afterlife that she knows is waiting somewhere. She leaves behind a wake of miracles and happy accidents, often receiving assistance from kind strangers who eventually realize that she was the one sent to help them. It’s a low-stakes affair — perhaps the lowest stakes we’ve ever seen in a movie that’s so blatantly centered around questions of life and death — but Aranda’s joyful charisma and cinematographer Alex Metcalfe’s stunning storybook images make “Cielo” a pleasure to watch.

For all its metaphysical complexity, the film’s crux rests on an elegantly simple idea: anything is possible in the mind of an eight-year-old child, and we adults do ourselves no favors by complicating our worldviews as we age. There’s a comical joy to watching Santa explain her blunt beliefs to grown-ups who should know better, only to see them come around to her way of thinking. You can label it as either magical realism or the real-life magic that takes place when a jaded adult heals themselves by conversing with a child who still has enough free time for idealism. But no matter what you call it, it’s the kind of thing that convinces an otherwise rational priest to hand over his car keys and convinces wrestlers and cops to indulge ideas that aren’t much more rational.

The film gradually shifts that premise from the literal to the metaphorical, letting it snowball from a dry rumination on the infinite possibilities of childhood into a more surreal tableau that suggests the children really were right all along. Sciamma takes his audience by the hand, leading us to the brink of paradise while respectfully acknowledging that he has to let each viewer make the final jump on their own terms.

Spiritual maturity occurs somewhere between the moment you start to suspect that simple concepts like Heaven and Hell are unlikely to exist in the way that religions tell us they do, and the moment you stop denouncing those stories as lies and start accepting them as devices tasked with explaining something truly transcendent to our mortal brains. “Cielo” is a delightful film that plants itself firmly in the middle of that process. Whether Heaven is a literal reward that we receive after death or a more abstract state that can be experienced in this lifetime is beside the point — children like Santa believe in it wholeheartedly, and Sciamma believes that placing a bit of our trust in them can heal more wounds than any amount of church services.

Grade: B+

A Juno Films release, “Cielo” is now playing at Quad Cinemas in New York City.

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newsletter In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.