Alfonso Cuaron’s most personal film draws from his own childhood memories to tell the story of Cleo, a Mixtec domestic worker employed by a middle-class family in Mexico City’s Roma neighborhood during the early 1970s. Shot in luminous black and white, the film follows Cleo through the rhythms of domestic labor, a pregnancy, political upheaval, and a beach sequence that ranks among the most emotionally powerful scenes in contemporary cinema.
Roma won three Academy Awards including Best Director and Best Cinematography, and was widely recognized as one of the defining films of its decade.
Cuaron’s Memory Made Visible
The black-and-white cinematography, shot by Cuaron himself, achieves a visual beauty that transforms everyday scenes into images of extraordinary power. Water washing across a driveway, reflecting the sky. A car squeezing through a narrow garage. Children playing on a rooftop. Cuaron finds visual poetry in the mundane with a consistency that makes the entire film feel like a remembered dream rendered in impossible detail.
Yalitza Aparicio’s performance as Cleo is a revelation of naturalness. A schoolteacher with no acting experience, Aparicio brings an unforced presence to the role that professional training might have polished away. Her Cleo is watchful, resilient, and emotionally deep without ever being demonstrative, and the camera’s constant attention to her face reveals a rich internal life through the smallest shifts in expression.
Cuaron’s direction of the domestic spaces is meticulous and revealing. The family home becomes a complete world, and the way characters move through it, who takes up space, who cleans, who serves, who waits, communicates the class dynamics that the film explores without ever stating them directly.
The political backdrop of the Corpus Christi massacre is woven into the narrative with devastating effect. Cuaron doesn’t build toward this event dramatically. It erupts into Cleo’s life at its most vulnerable moment, and the collision of personal and political crisis creates the film’s most harrowing sequence.
The beach scene near the film’s conclusion is a sustained piece of filmmaking that moves from terror to release to confession, achieving an emotional catharsis that draws its power from everything the film has quietly accumulated over the preceding two hours.
The Deliberate Distance
Cuaron’s approach to storytelling here is observational rather than intimate, and the emotional distance this creates is the film’s most debated quality. The camera often holds back from its subjects, capturing them within wider compositions that emphasize environment over psychology. Some viewers found this approach cold, creating admiration for the filmmaking without emotional connection to the characters.
The film’s slow pace and lack of conventional narrative momentum will test viewers expecting a traditional story structure. Long stretches follow the routines of domestic work without dramatic incident, and the film asks its audience to find meaning in repetition and daily ritual.
The political context, while important to the film’s setting, remains backgrounded in ways that some viewers found frustrating. Those hoping for a more direct engagement with Mexico’s political history in the early 1970s may find Cuaron’s personal-over-political approach limiting.
The decision to have Cleo’s emotional climax articulated in dialogue rather than left to Aparicio’s physical performance struck some as inconsistent with the film’s otherwise show-don’t-tell approach.
The Person in the Background
Roma’s radical act is to place at its center a person whom cinema, and society, typically ignores. Cleo occupies the background of the family’s life, present but unseen, essential but unacknowledged. Cuaron’s camera reverses this invisibility, treating her labor, her joy, and her grief with the same epic attention that films usually reserve for the privileged. The film doesn’t sentimentalize her or use her suffering as a lesson for the family she serves. It simply watches her, fully and carefully, and the act of watching becomes itself a form of recognition and respect.
Should You Watch Roma?
If you appreciate cinema as a visual art and are willing to surrender to a film’s rhythm rather than demanding pace, Roma offers one of the most beautiful and emotionally rich viewing experiences of the past decade. Cuaron’s technical mastery serves a deeply human story, and Aparicio’s performance grounds the film’s visual ambition with unforced truth. Those who need narrative momentum or who find observational cinema alienating may struggle, but viewers who meet the film on its own terms will find something truly extraordinary.
The Verdict on Roma
Roma is Alfonso Cuaron’s most complete artistic statement, a film that uses the tools of cinema to make visible a life that would otherwise go unrecorded. The black-and-white photography is astonishing, Aparicio’s performance is a gift, and Cuaron’s direction achieves a balance between the personal and the epic that few filmmakers ever reach. The film asks nothing more than your attention and rewards it with moments of beauty and emotional power that prove cinema’s capacity to honor ordinary lives with extraordinary care.