Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele

There might be no better time than now to mainline a story about a repressed woman pushing at restrictions in her culturally conservative world, which Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s Clara Sola offers up with a forestful of divine energy, artistry, and mystery.

Film Threat by Sabina Dana Plasse

Clara Sola is an intriguing film ripe with symbolism and strong performances.

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

Clara Sola is fleshed with the feeling that love and repression are braided together. It’s bound by the sense that we smother the things most precious to us in order to keep them from getting away.

TheWrap by Steve Pond

Clara Sola mixes religion, mysticism and sexuality in a way that feels simultaneously odd, disquieting and richly rewarding. It starts out beautifully restrained and ends up somewhere else entirely, but it’s all the more interesting for its split personality.

The New York Times by Devika Girish

Araya is remarkably tender as she sinks her fingers into the earth or gingerly lifts bugs off the ground, while Sophie Winqvist Loggins’s hushed, soft-focus camerawork imbues these moments with an almost spiritual grace.

Screen Daily by Jonathan Romney

What gives the film a force that balances out the delicacy is a commanding, charismatic lead by Wendy Chinchilla Araya, best known as a dancer, whose highly physical presence in turn evokes Clara’s sensitivity, isolation, vulnerability, fury and – despite the pressure to keep it hidden – powerful sexuality.

Variety by Jessica Kiang

Mesen’s delicate yet earthy, thoughtful yet sensual movie never tips its hand as to whether Clara’s abilities are real or imaginary — indeed it makes the line between fact and fantasy seem as nonsensical as it might to a horse — and it pays off in one of those obscurely uplifting endings.

The Hollywood Reporter by Sheri Linden

Set in a rural village and cast with nonactors, led by a feral performance from dancer Wendy Chinchilla Araya, the drama occupies its own territory, tinged with magical realism and deeply immersed in the sensory world. It’s also a vivid reminder that even a matriarchy can be paternalistic.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

Clara Sola is superbly filmed and composed with a very humid sense of atmosphere, and Araya’s performance is a miracle of sympathy and candour.

Paste Magazine by Natalia Keogan

Clara Sola remains rooted in a magical realism that gracefully grapples with the patriarchal limits imposed on women’s sexual pleasure, particularly when fellow women enforce them.

RogerEbert.com by Sheila O'Malley

This is Mesén's debut feature film, and it's a powerful and intuitive piece of work.

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

It makes for an engrossing character study, a Latin film with lots of local color, a hint of magical realism and an air of hopelessness tinged with menace — a unique cinematic experience.