When it comes to movies about disabilities, people with hearing impairment comprised one of the first groups to receive dramatic treatments that were not only sympathetic but insightful into the peculiar challenges they faced in a hearing world. Coda, a movie that explored the unique family dynamic between a hearing daughter and her deaf parents, won the 2022 Best Picture Oscar. The title of this Spanish movie, which has won a number of awards in Spain and at international film festivals, is about as blunt as you can get in terms of describing what it is about, and the movie is quite candid about its protagonist’s specific difficulties in navigating a world that isn’t always cognizant of her needs.

Angela (Miriam Garlo, the deaf sister of the film’s director, Eva Libertad) is a woman in her late 20s or early 30s who has been deaf most of her life due to a congenital condition. She is married to Hector (Alvaro Cervantes), a farmer who we assume has learned sign language in order to be with her. Almost as soon as we meet her, Angela, a professional potter, becomes pregnant, a development that delights her and Hector but seems to concern her own parents, both of whom are hearing. Before learning about the pregnancy, Angela’s mother (Elena Irureta) comments carelessly that it would probably be better if she and Hector don’t have children. When the couple consults their obstetrician as to whether the child might be deaf, the doctor takes Angela’s family history—her maternal grandmother and an aunt were also deaf—and ventures that the chances are 50-50, but they won’t know until the child is born. As her pregnancy progresses, Angela pays close attention to her deaf friends and their relationships with their own children and starts to become anxious as she notices how one deaf couple’s 12-year-old hearing son often blows off his parents because he’s tired of signing. However, when she signs with a group of deaf children she comes alive to the prospect of being a fully engaged mother. This mood is undermined when her parents offer to have her fitted for a new model hearing aid and she rejects their “charity,” saying that she hates hearing aids anyway. This emotional roller coaster continues without pause into her labor, which is long and difficult, with nurses trying to communicate what she should do through Hector’s interpretation, which becomes a blur of misunderstanding that only adds to the pain and confusion. Perhaps as a result, Angela’s post-partum depression is particularly pronounced and intensifies when the doctor announces a few months later that her daughter, Ona, is not deaf, information that would normally be received as happy news but which Angela finds dispiriting as she envisions her daughter slipping away from her.

To its credit, Deaf is more about the tribulations of pregnancy and immediate motherhood than it is about being hearing impaired, and Libertad might have made a more involving movie had she emphasized that aspect. Hector is portrayed as a superhumanly empathetic partner whose measured reactions to all of Angela’s fear and anger can come across as overly compensating, but it’s actually this sensitivity that is most frustrating to her, since she sees his efforts to bond with their hearing daughter as inadvertently cutting her off from her relationship with the child. Toward the end, Libertad uses a tired cinematic device to highlight Angela’s difficulties—she has the sound design recreate Angela’s aural perception of the world. The device makes its intended effect but feels unnecessarily showy. Garlo’s impassioned performance does a perfectly good job of conveying Angela’s pains and joys as a woman and new mother. We don’t need the movie to artificially mimic her sensory circumstances, which come across as more of a distraction than an illustration.

In Spanish and Spanish sign language. Opens May 1 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707).

Deaf home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Distinto Films SLU, Nexus Creafilms SL, A Contracorriente Films SL, Diverso Films AIE