Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Urzula Barba Hopfner
Starring: Naian González Norvind, Cristo Fernández, Carolina Politi, Mariana Gimenez, Laura de Ita, Gerardo Trejoluna
Accordingly, acute agoraphobia is on the rise. Drawing links to the aftereffects of the coronavirus years, boffins claim that the number of people reluctant to leave the house and interact with external environments which they feel to be unsafe has increased significantly. Of course it has. Working from home - pet on your lap/a decent breakfast/time to do a workout at lunch - exposed the working nine to five for the scam it always was. Who could go back to the rat race? Staying in has become pathologized, but to me it seems like common sense. You have my empathy agoraphobes, but, honestly, you're not missing much out there. Everything is too expensive for one thing, and for another most people are annoying arseholes. Much better to sit in with a good book, a cat and some home-made cold brew.
Mind you, being a dejected shut-in is easy in South Wales, where, at the end of June we are on our hundredth day of rain this month. Perhaps the situation would be more equivocal in sun blessed Guadalajara, where we find agoraphobic Corina (Naian González Norvind), protagonist of Urzula Barba Hopfner's (writing duties shared with Samuel Sosa) underwhelming Corina. Via a cordial voiceover (the warm narration an early indicator of Corina's fairy-tale mode), we learn that Corina is a "style editor" (for "pulp-erotica"-!) at a publishing house, only ever leaving the apartment she shares with her similarly affected mother to painstakingly navigate the daily walk to the office, where she works in the basement away from everyone else.
The film is set in the year 2000, and perhaps there is a retro-aspect to Corina's colourful visual set (to me, cinematic representations of Mexico always look pleasingly worn and period anyway...), but moreover the historical setting serves to facilitate the old-school conflict of the narrative. Through a series of mishaps, Corina ends up early losing the ailing publishing house's most famous author and cash cow, enacting a road trip where she not only has to save her job but overcome her phobia of the outdoors, too. If only the 1.13 million people who suffer agoraphobia nationwide could similarly undergo a whimsical hero's quest to sort themselves out...
Things start going awry for Corina when the local café expands, with the owner's hunky cousin Carlos (Cristo Fernández - Hispanic Jason Momoa) working on the extension, unsettling Corina's routine. At her work, her incredibly glamorous boss (Ariana Candela) barks about the commercial prospects of the novel, and that she "couldn't give a fuck" for the author's vision when the fate of the publishing house rests on her book's success. The established corporate context of the publishing world is intriguing (unlike films and music, where business shenanigans are open aspects of the medium, we tend to forget that novels are subject to similar industrial scrutiny) because, after all, what in the world is more important than books? For Corina, who wants to be a writer herself, nothing. She takes it upon herself to fix the cursed manuscript yet ends up causing herself and everyone else more trouble. The only solution seems to be for her and Carlos to locate the original writer...
Peppered throughout the film are high angle close up shots of Norvind'’s little bird-like face looking confused, while, with similar consistency, the soundtrack ripples with ostinato drums, as if to constantly visually and aurally indicate Corina's condition. Like the voiceover at the start, the affectations are an unnecessary tell rather than the show, as if the film doesn't trust the performances to tell the story. The voiceover is unceremoniously dropped early on anyway, an omission typical of Corina which stops short of developing ideas or conceits, and instead simply solves conflict with waves of a narrative magic wand. For example, despite the careful establishment of Corina's debilitating condition, she very quickly gets over it as she and Carlos embark on the road journey to locate the firebrand writer (in fairness, the mise-en-scene is more subtly expressive during these scenes as angles open up wide to display the gorgeous Mexican countryside, a space not to be feared but to luxuriate in). Events don't seem to hang together or coalesce; it's almost as if, you know, the film itself could have done with its own style editor, etc. Nonetheless, with its cheerful characters and pretty escapism, Corina is a pleasant enough watch. Maybe one for a rainy Sunday afternoon streaming, but perhaps not worth leaving the house for.
Corina received its UK premiere at the 2025 Raindance Film Festival.
