Grief is heavy, but sometimes a stranger can help you carry the load. This film shows us that even when the world is locked down, life has a way of opening up new paths toward forgiveness and connection.
Some films begin with a death. Ramón y Ramón begins with something colder: the bureaucracy after death.
A man receives a container with his father’s ashes. There is no proper goodbye, no funeral full of voices, no room where grief can gather and become human. The world is under lockdown. Bodies disappear into systems. Families speak through screens. People are alive, but unreachable. The dead are gone, but somehow still taking up space in the room.
That is where Ramón stands when the film opens: not devastated in the obvious cinematic way, not falling apart for our benefit, but suspended. He has lost a father he was already distant from. That kind of grief is difficult because it does not arrive cleanly. It brings sadness, yes, but also anger, embarrassment, unfinished questions, and the ugly little guilt of not knowing whether you are mourning the person or the relationship you never had.
Directed by Salvador del Solar, Ramón y Ramón is a quiet drama about that emotional confusion. It is also a road movie, a pandemic story, a father-son story, and, gently but unmistakably, a film about queer loneliness and the hunger for tenderness. But it never shouts its themes. It lets them sit in the room, sometimes masked, sometimes silent, sometimes pretending to talk about something else.
Ramón, played by Emanuel Soriano, receives the ashes of his father, Ramón Alcócer, during the COVID-19 confinement. His first instinct is practical: perhaps the ashes should go back to his father’s people, to the place where he was born, to those who knew him better. In his own apartment, the father feels almost like a stranger. There is something painfully honest in that. Ramón is not rejecting the dead man. He simply does not know what to do with him.
Then Mateo enters.
Played by Álvaro Cervantes, Mateo is stuck in Lima after returning from abroad. His apartment is empty, the city is closed, and his life, like Ramón’s, has been interrupted mid-sentence. Their meeting could have been written as a convenient plot device, but the film gives it a more awkward, human rhythm. Mateo needs a mattress. Ramón has one. From there, a connection begins — not with grand declarations, but with food, small favors, late-night conversations, and the strange intimacy that lockdown created between people who were suddenly forced to face themselves.
The best thing about Ramón y Ramón is how carefully it understands emotional timing. Ramón does not confess everything at once. Mateo does not magically heal him. Their bond is not presented as a cure. It is more like a lamp switched on in a dark hallway. It does not solve the house, but it helps you see where you are standing.
Through their conversations, Ramón’s wound slowly becomes clearer. His childhood memories of his father are tender at first. He remembers leaving little notes on the door: “Ramón and Ramón.” A child’s way of saying: we belong together, we are a pair, I am yours and you are mine. Then the memory breaks. The father disappears from the home. Later, when Ramón is older, a moment of innocent affection exposes the truth his father cannot accept. The look Ramón remembers is not anger alone, but disgust. Disappointment. The kind of look that can become a prison if it comes from someone whose love you needed.
The film’s emotional center is not simply that Ramón’s father rejected him. It is that Ramón has spent years trying to understand a man who may never have understood himself. That is a much more complicated pain. It is easy to hate the dead when they are monsters. It is harder when other people remember them as good friends, good brothers, generous men, beloved figures in a community. Ramón y Ramón is brave enough to allow both truths to exist.
This becomes especially powerful when Ramón reaches his father’s birthplace and encounters the community that still carries Ramón Alcócer with warmth. The father who hurt him was also loved. The father who failed him also mattered to others. The film does not ask Ramón to forgive cheaply. It does not turn trauma into a motivational poster with mountains in the background. Instead, it gives him something more useful and more painful: context.
The cultural presence of the huaconada, the traditional dance connected to Mito, gives the film a deeper symbolic layer. Masks, punishment, ritual, memory, public identity — all of it echoes Ramón’s private wound. A mask can preserve tradition, but it can also hide cowardice. A whip can become performance, but also judgment. The father’s world is full of symbols Ramón once admired as a child. Returning to it as an adult, he has to ask what those symbols protected, and whom they left outside.
What keeps the film from becoming too heavy is Mateo. He brings lightness, but not in the annoying “comic relief” way. He is open, wounded in his own quieter register, and oddly free because his own life is also paused. Their relationship has an uncertain beauty. It may be friendship, attraction, refuge, or all of that at once. The film wisely does not rush to label it. Some connections matter precisely because they arrive in a form too fragile for naming.
There is a lovely melancholy in the idea that two people can meet during a global shutdown and briefly become necessary to each other. Not permanent. Not promised. Necessary. Mateo does not rescue Ramón. Ramón does not rescue Mateo. But for a while, they give each other permission to move.
If there is a weakness, it may be that Ramón y Ramón moves with such quiet restraint that some viewers may find it too soft, too internal, too willing to linger in pauses. This is not a film built for dramatic explosions. Its power is cumulative. It gathers in small gestures: a mattress offered, a song remembered, a photograph avoided, a name spoken aloud, a dead man being called “present” by people who still need him to be there.
But that restraint is also the film’s strength. It understands that grief is rarely theatrical when it is happening. Most of the time, grief is logistical. You answer calls. You move boxes. You decide where ashes should go. You pretend to be fine because the alternative would inconvenience everyone, including yourself.
Ramón y Ramón is a tender, thoughtful drama about the distance between fathers and sons, and the long shadow left by love that arrived mixed with shame. It is about the people who wound us, the people who remember them differently, and the strangers who briefly walk beside us when we are carrying something too heavy.
By the end, the film does not offer a clean reconciliation. Good. Clean reconciliation would be dishonest. What it offers instead is softer and more mature: the possibility that healing does not always mean understanding everything. Sometimes it only means putting down the ashes, accepting the silence, and walking forward without asking the dead to finally become who you needed them to be.
