Young Critics Lab

22 décembre 2025

Maspalomas Review: A Late-Life Homecoming That Isn’t Home

By Edin Čusto

Directors Aitor Arregi and José Mari Goenaga reunite to stage a deceptively simple juxtaposition: the safety of a place versus the inevitability of time. Rather than being a memento mori story, Maspalomas is a memento senectutis, reminding us to acknowledge old age, specifically in gay life where youth is often treated as the only currency that counts.

The feature drama follows Vicente (José Ramón Soroiz), a 76-year-old gay man living a carefree, sunlit existence in Maspalomas in the Canary Islands. Having recently separated from his partner of fifty years, Vicente moves through the resort town with a buoyancy that reads less like denial and more like a decision, as if joy is something he actively chooses, minute by minute. When circumstances force him to return to San Sebastián, he enters a nursing home and begins the quieter, harsher process of reconciling the life he has built with the life he can still live. Along the way, he reconnects with his daughter Nerea (Nagore Aranburu), and the narrative opens up to become more intergenerational and complicated than a straightforward late-life reinvention story.

One of the film’s quiet achievements is what it refuses. It is rare enough for queer cinema to cast older gay men as protagonists rather than punchlines, ghosts or cautionary figures. Maspalomas goes further by challenging the stereotype of the older gay man as being automatically secure, comfortably partnered and financially insulated. Vicente is not destitute, but he is not protected either. His independence has rough edges, and the script does not sand them down for the sake of inspiration. 

Set in Maspalomas, the first act is where the story most openly courts pleasure, and it does so with a frankness that feels observed rather than designed to shock. Vicente cruises at a beach spot, takes part in Pride parades, goes to raves and drifts through sex parties. The explicitness is part of the work’s authenticity, not a provocation. Arregi and Goenaga treat these spaces as social ecosystems rather than set dressing, allowing Vicente to belong to them without apology or being reduced to a symbol.

Soroiz’s performance is the anchor. It is disarming in its lack of defensiveness. You can feel, in the looseness of Vicente’s face and the ease of his smile, the relief of a man who spent the first quarter of his life closeted and is determined not to waste what remains. Vicente’s delight is not naïve, but informed. His expressions suggest someone who is acutely aware of time and grateful anyway. Soroiz does not make grand statements about freedom or self-acceptance. He renders them unnecessary. In his hands, sentiments that could easily become platitudes are given the weight and texture of something actually lived, becoming earned truths.

Vicente shares this Maspalomas life with his best friend Ramón (Zorion Eguileor), who helps him out after his breakup as his ex had supported him financially. This detail matters, because it grounds the hedonism in logistics and dependency – the kinds of arrangements people rarely admit to out loud. Their friendship is intimate without being romanticized. The script resists the easy temptation of treating male closeness as either a punchline or a twist, and also avoids performative sentimentality of films like The Bucket List. Here, the bond is not a lesson. It is simply a fact of survival.

When Vicente relocates to San Sebastián, the mood shifts decisively. Javi Aguirre Erauso’s camera settles into a cooler, greyer register after the warmth and saturated colors of Maspalomas. The change is not just aesthetic, but social too. In the nursing home, Vicente must negotiate his sexuality in a quietly conservative environment where older queer people often feel pressured to retreat into a kind of safety through invisibility. The irony is sharp. Vicente once escaped this very demographic to find refuge, but now he must live among it again, with all its stubbornness and its unexamined prejudices.

His roommate Xanti (Kandido Uranga) embodies that hostility – he’s homophobic, among other prejudiced attitudes – and the story does not pretend that such attitudes are uncommon. Still, the dynamic between the two men is more interesting than a straightforward villain narrative. There is friction and begrudging proximity, and there are moments that suggest change is possible, even if only partial and messy. At times, the nursing home is portrayed with such a gentleness that it verges on idealization, especially in an era when public conversations about elder care tend to focus on neglect, understaffing and abuse. The focus here is less on institutional critique than on the possibility of dignity.

Maspalomas also incorporates the COVID-19 pandemic, and this is the one element that risks bogging the whole thing down. While the pandemic adds thematic weight, it can also flatten the rhythm, pulling the focus away from Vicente’s personal reckoning and towards a broader historical marker. You can sense that parts of the script were conceived earlier and that the pandemic was added later, making the integration feel slightly uneven.

Where the film regains its sharpness is in its portrayal of gay life today. It meditates on the evolution of queer spaces, from bars that once served as hiding places and communal sanctuaries, to the apps that have replaced them, restructuring desire into something closer to instant judgment – a rapid inquisition of faces, ages and bodies. In this context, Maspalomas is revealed not just as a paradise, but also a compromise of sorts. A haven, yes, but also – as Vicente remarks – a city-sized closet. A place where being out is easy because the environment has been designed around a particular kind of outness.

It is this ambivalence that gives the film its bite. While it’s warm and even celebratory, it does not simplify the cost of safety. It asks what it means to build a life in a place that protects you, and what happens when time forces you back to places that do not. It does so through a performance that makes gratitude feel less like a slogan and more like a practice: Vicente performs it not for others, but for himself, as a way of staying connected to his own life.