On the island of Gran Canaria lies the Canary Islands’ largest resort centre, Maspalomas, also known as one of the world’s most famous queer tourism destinations. In Jose Mari Goenaga and Aitor Arregi’s co-directed eponymous film, with a screenplay by Goenaga, men of all ages roam the dunes on the outskirts of the city, cruising. This is where we first meet Vicente (José Ramón Soroiz), freshly single and on the hookup apps with the help of his best friend Ramon (Zorion Eguileor). Predominantly in the Basque language, Maspalomas made its world premiere at the 2025 San Sebastián International Film Festival in the main competition, where Soroiz won the Best Actor prize for his role as Vicente. So as music beats through the atmosphere lit by the hot sun, and he picks up his regular draft beer on the beach from the bartender to observe the throngs of men around him, we see that Vicente is fully in his element here. This is his home—and why shouldn’t it be?
The catch is that Vicente is 76, far beyond the age that anyone might expect in the aforementioned setting. The gently moustachioed septuagenarian is, on the surface, more grandfatherly than anything else. Yet stereotypes be damned: Vicente is freshly single, but freshly single after breaking up with his partner of more than two decades, and that shouldn’t matter. From the outset, the writing-directing duo—two of the co-founders of the famed Basque production label Moriarti Produkzioak—has given us an enticing and wholly unique premise.
However, they don’t stop there, throwing the film’s primary wrench into the machine: Vincente’s age might not matter mentally, but it does physically. After having a stroke while mid-hookup at a club, he wakes up to find himself in a senior home in San Sebastián, under the care of his estranged daughter Nerea (Nagore Aranburu). His once multihued environment has turned plain and drab, his face is pale, and his ginger hair is now a dull grey. The stark physical transformation that he undergoes is already a shock to the eyes. But as the camera zooms through the facility, Vicente’s terror dawns on us, too: what’s a gay man with a life of partying and having sex on the beach going to do here, compelled into a routine filled with communal meals and card games?
Vicente must contend with a central queer conceit: what do you do when you’re forced into the very environment you sought to escape from? Like being back in a conservative place or in a country where homosexuality is condemned, being at the care home for Vicente means being back in the closet, and being back in the closet means exorcising himself of everything that he’s fought for. These choices have included painful sacrifices, including leaving his wife and kid a quarter of a decade ago to live his truth. Maspalomas empathetically captures Vicente’s initial fear and insecurity, plunging us into his frustrated state of mind, as if his mind is locked inside a body he can’t escape.
Exemplifying this fight is Vicente’s daily encounters with his conservative and highly heterosexual roommate Xanti (Kandido Uranga), who is most concerned with having a conventionally attractive woman caregiver. Lo and behold, Vicente is given Iñaki (Kepa Errasti) as his personal caregiver, a younger man he quickly finds on a hookup app and begins chatting with, anonymously. Our protagonist continues to live out this double life as he tries to hold onto some semblance of his old life, fully out of his element. The greatest thrill of Maspalomas is determining what Vicente will do next; however, he begins to run out of options.
Approximately halfway through the work, the filmmaking duo pulls another set of unexpected moves. Vicente warms to Xanti’s well-meaning purity, even if they are completely different, and they begin to form a unique friendship. At the same time, he begins to self-sabotage his relationship with Iñaki, frustrated with the limited physical contact they have as caregiver and care home resident. The film also introduces the element of the COVID pandemic, which throws the story a bit into disarray as the story flounders to develop and seeks a way to put Vicente into new conditions.
While not completely satisfying in their delivery, Goenaga and Arregi offer a very inventive and accessible way to reexamine the issue of secrecy and hiding for queer people worldwide, with our protagonist’s core reckoning becomes the film’s pièce de résistance. In many cases, the options are fight, flight, or freeze; without the opportunity to flee, Vicente both fights and freezes, fighting against the nursing home administration while freezing in his relationship with Nerea. Only when he begins to find a balance between acceptance and gentle resistance does he begin to gain control of his surroundings, seemingly antithetical to what he believes in. Xanti, here, is a perfect example of this, as what Vicente initially took as hostile behaviour from his talkative roommate eventually becomes key to his well-being. In crafting this trio of relationships, the filmmakers also invite us to reconsider the walls that we have hastily constructed in order to protect ourselves—yet perhaps some of them might be better off torn down, slowly, to see if we’re putting them up out of necessity or out of fear.
*****
Watch the trailer for the film here:
