Reviewed on February 22nd at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival – Panorama. 99 Mins
Cast: Miriam Garlo, Álvaro Cervantes, Elena Irureta, Joquín Notario
Genre: Drama
Director: Eva Libertad
In Irish Cinemas: 12th September 2025
Eva Libertad’s Deaf (2025) stages one of the most harrowing childbirth sequences ever committed to film. Miriam Garlo, in a performance both ferocious and vulnerable, plays Ángela — a deaf woman caught in the throes of labour. She’s surrounded by medical professionals who treat her body with clinical precision but disregard her humanity. Doctors and nurses shout instructions as if sound alone could reach her, commanding her to push, to breathe, to obey. Her husband, Héctor (Álvaro Cervantes), who can hear and sign, frantically tries to bridge the communication gap. Yet even his presence cannot dismantle the wall between Ángela and the room. In a desperate act of survival, she tears the surgical mask from a doctor’s face to catch the shape of his words.
It’s a scene that feels almost unbearable to watch — urgent, intimate, and infused with real danger. And it sets the tone for Libertad’s raw, deeply personal drama. That intimacy is no accident: Garlo, the film’s lead, is also the director’s sister, and the collaboration yields a portrayal of deafness that feels lived-in rather than observed. The film doesn’t paint Ángela as isolated because no one cares about her; instead, it underlines something more insidious — how good intentions often fail when met with a lack of proper understanding.
The opening establishes Ángela and Héctor as tender, playful partners. After a serene skinny dip in a quiet swimming hole, the couple lies in bed trading baby names. Their connection is obvious: Héctor is affectionate, protective, and willing to step into her world. He accompanies her to dinners with her deaf friends, making earnest, if imperfect, efforts to belong. Yet even in these moments of intimacy, silence lingers — mainly when the question of their unborn child’s hearing arises.
When the doctors confirm that the baby will be able to hear, the balance of their relationship shifts. At first, the change is imperceptible, like hairline fractures beneath the surface. But once their child arrives, the fissures widen. The baby naturally orients toward Héctor, who communicates with ease, while Ángela feels herself slipping into the margins of her own family. The more the child bonds with her father, the more visible Ángela’s exclusion becomes.
The brilliance of Deaf lies in how patiently it builds this erosion of closeness. For its first hour, the film presents everyday conflicts with such precision that the audience feels the slow accumulation of strain. What might seem trivial in isolation — an untranslated conversation at a family dinner, a friend speaking too quickly without eye contact, the stabbing frequencies of a poorly calibrated hearing aid — becomes crushing when layered over time. The dread is not theatrical but mundane, the dread of knowing that Ángela’s deafness, in a household defined by hearing, might eventually unravel the ties that hold her marriage together.
This is where Deaf stands apart from films like Sian Heder’s Oscar-winning CODA (2021). Whereas CODA centres its drama around a hearing character’s perspective, Libertad resolutely keeps the camera and the story focused on Ángela. The film never diminishes Héctor’s struggles — his confusion, his yearning to connect, his exhaustion are treated with nuance — but Deaf belongs to Ángela. Her frustrations, her joy, her alienation form the spine of the narrative. And the film refuses to soften her experience. Whether she’s mocked for dancing with her deaf friends at a nightclub or left stranded at a dinner table where conversations overlap in a blur of mouths she can’t read, the audience feels her isolation as both social and sensory.
The film is at its most potent when it fully immerses us in Ángela’s perspective. Near the climax, as tensions between her and Héctor escalate to breaking point, Libertad makes a daring formal choice: almost all sound vanishes. What remains is a soundscape of muffled noise and sharp, jarring tones — a sonic claustrophobia that collapses the boundary between audience and character. We aren’t simply watching Ángela’s struggle anymore; we’re submerged in it. While films like The Sound of Metal (2019) and Babel (2006) have experimented with similar techniques, Deaf sustains the effect for an unflinching stretch of time, immersing us in her world until it becomes unbearable. The silence is not a gimmick but a demand: feel what she feels, sit with her discomfort, and understand that it is inescapable.
Ultimately, Deaf is not just about deafness but about the impossibility of seamless intimacy between people who inhabit different sensory realities. Love may be abundant, effort sincere, but a gulf remains — one that no amount of goodwill can entirely close. Libertad doesn’t romanticise that gap, nor does she despair over it; instead, she lets us dwell within its uneasy truth. The result is a film that is not only empathetic but also unflinchingly honest — a drama that respects its protagonist enough to show her pain without simplifying it, and her strength without sentimentalising it.
Overall: 8/10
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