Tótem begins with a child’s practical problem: Sol is getting ready to attend her father Tona’s birthday celebration. Lila Avilés turns that ordinary preparation into a precise measure of a family trying to make a day feel normal while illness has made normality impossible. The birthday is not a cheerful interruption of grief. It is the form grief takes when people still need to cook, dress, argue, welcome guests and decide what a child should be told.
The 2023 Mexican film understands that a family gathering is an editing room. Adults select what to say, what to conceal, when to joke, whom to correct and which ritual will keep the day moving. Sol observes all of it. Her attention gives the film its ethics: the adults may believe they are shielding her, but she reads the changes in their voices, their errands and the rooms they will not let her enter. Childhood here is not innocence outside the crisis. It is a highly developed way of noticing its atmosphere.
Avilés builds the house as a crowded ecology. Aunts, cousins, animals, flowers, food, medicines and decorations compete for space; each has its own demand on the family’s limited energy. That density keeps the film from reducing Tona’s illness to a solitary tragedy. Care is distributed unevenly. It can look like devotion in one moment and impatience in the next. The household’s friction is not evidence that love has failed. It is evidence that love is work performed under conditions no one can master.
Sol’s relationship to her father stays central because the film does not ask her to become a philosopher of loss. She wants proximity, reassurance and a recognizable version of the day. The grown-ups’ ceremonies can offer her only partial access. When the party gathers force, joy becomes real without cancelling what everyone knows. That coexistence is the film’s most difficult achievement.
Sol's grandfather's house is particular in its clutter, jokes and changing rules of intimacy. The family cannot give Tona more time by arranging a perfect party, and Sol cannot make the adults speak plainly by asking more carefully. Yet the work of preparing food, clearing rooms and receiving guests gives them a way to remain together for this one day. Avilés leaves room for laughter inside the threatened occasion. Grief is neither postponed until after the celebration nor allowed to cancel it. The birthday's ordinary labor makes the approaching loss felt without requiring anyone to pronounce its meaning for the child.