Salon de Belleza (2026) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for fish tanks
Take a Drink: for each new resident of the beauty salon
Take a Drink: for sojourns beneath the sea
Do a Shot: kitty!
By: Henry J. Fromage (Three Beers) –
It wouldn’t be a major film festival without a genuine headscratcher or two in the mix.
Salon de Belleza is set in what used to be a beauty salon, but which has become a kind of refuge and purgatory for the sick and cast aside as its owner and our guide cares for them (and his fish) as best as he can.
A Toast
Right from the beginning, it’s clear we’re entering a world of metaphor. We see a fish eating their former companion, now floating upside down and little but meat. As the camera pulls out from there, we see impressively shabby, grubby set design- you can just feel the decay of this formerly vibrant beauty salon, as we observe in a few flashbacks.
The aging hairdresser has become a kind of Mother Theresa to a panoply of outcasts- immigrants, people with AIDs and other diseases, the forgotten margins of society. The state of his salon turned flophouse may also be a societal metaphor- things don’t seem in any less disarray outside its doors.
Director Nathalia Acevedo composes some really eye-catching shots, too, like one in which a woman looks towards a hole in the wall, which the camera travels to and through to a twilight beach scene. On some plane of existence, perhaps not this one, or perhaps not this time, there’s beauty to grab ahold of.
Beer Two
The storytelling is elliptical to put it nicely. We see sex, death, and decay, ad infinitum. Perhaps this is all our protagonist now experiences as he pines for a a sunnier past and tries to care for victims of this atemporal AIDs epidemic, but it’s quite a weight on the film.
Beer Three
This longing for the past is palpable, but outside of his voiceover, it’s hard to get any sense of his character outside of little context clues we see here and there. That’s, of course, a conscious filmmaking choice, but one that keeps us at a bit of a distance.
Verdict
Salon de Belleza is an enigmatic parable of deterioration and preserving whatever dignity possible in this inevitable journey.
