THE STORY – Elisa is one of the last young women chosen to go North, a kind of
promised land where history is being made. Everyone around her,
including her beloved Mother, eagerly awaits her departure. But soon Elisa
realizes that she does not want to leave and that simply saying so is not
enough.
THE CAST – Martina Passeggi, Sofía Gala Castiglione, Soledad Pelayo & Alfonso Tort
THE TEAM – Lucía Garibaldi (Director/Writer) & Federico Alvarado (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 98 Minutes
In “A Bright Future” (“Un futuro brillante”), Uruguayan filmmaker Lucía Garibaldi follows up her Sundance-winning debut “The Sharks” with a film set in a vaguely post-apocalyptic South America. Her second feature doesn’t display the kind of dystopia where the sky is perpetually ablaze or cities crumble under robot insurgency. Instead, this is a world disarmingly close to our present. It’s a dystopia that weaponizes hustle culture to mean opportunity, self-improvement, and a “better life.”
At the film’s center is Elisa (a remarkably intuitive performance from first-time actor Martina Passeggi), an 18-year-old girl who has the misfortune of being considered exceptional. Her prize? A one-way ticket to The North – a so-called Promised Land where youth are exported like precious commodities. It’s a place that no one returns from, including Elisa’s sister. She was sent to that bureaucratic utopia years ago and is now brainwashed into believing that work is of utmost importance. Elisa no longer really has a sister – just a hollow voice behind an answering machine.
Garibaldi crafts a world that feels both surreal and disturbingly familiar: Vast isolated apartment blocks, old cassette tapes, and decaying supermarkets signal a society that’s both retrofuturistic and a shadow of itself, clinging to productivity like a life raft floating North. The mise-en-scène – with hints of a darker, sci-fi Wes Anderson – amplifies the tension between chasing a dream and human connection. It’s a world where ants are feared, dogs are extinct, and work means more than life and family.
What makes “A Bright Future” so striking is its quiet, pointed critique of hustle culture. The North feels like a grand myth built on optimization and sacrifice. It’s a place where only the mentally sound and psychologically efficient deserve to advance. Young people are selected for their “promise,” which here means their willingness to be remade; to fit perfectly into an invisible system that rewards compliance with vague salvation.
Elisa faces a dilemma, and Passeggi’s performance captures this in a way that’s soft, uncertain, even passive. Elisa sinks into a chair when told she’s “chosen,” and as her preparation for The North intensifies – mental evaluations, physical regimens, ideological conditioning – her desire to remain herself, to remain at home, begins to surface. It’s this resistance – hesitant, emotional, and deeply human – that becomes the film’s quiet revolution. Elisa is part of the generation unafraid to fight against the old establishment.
The supporting cast deepens the texture of this unnerving world. Sofía Gala Castiglione is magnetic as Leonor, an enigmatic neighbor with a prosthetic leg and a punk spirit. She chose love over escape, mutilation over assimilation – a haunting but oddly romantic gesture that resonates with Elisa and makes her decision-making even more complicated. Alfonso Tort as Elisa’s uncle and Soledad Pelayo as her mother give grounded performances as those in Elisa’s life caught between tradition and delusion.
Viewers will find the film’s pace glacial and its mysteries frustratingly opaque. Garibaldi doesn’t spoon-feed answers; The North remains elusive, impenetrable, like we’re not allowed to know its secrets or true purpose. But perhaps that’s precisely the point. Hustle culture, after all, thrives on ambiguity: We sacrifice sleep, leisure, and joy for futures we don’t understand or know will be there.
“A Bright Future” is strange, slow, and opaque, but it’s also a striking meditation on what happens when what is most important becomes clouded at the cost of chasing an idealized future. Garibaldi doesn’t just critique hustle culture – she crushes it by instead presenting the importance of life on our own terms.
