Roma

About the film

Contains story spoilers.

Cleo works in a Mexico City household where Sofía's husband, Antonio, is increasingly absent. When Cleo becomes pregnant, her boyfriend Fermín abandons her. Sofía offers support while struggling with her own marriage. Cleo later finds Fermín at a paramilitary training camp, where he threatens her. During a violent attack on student protesters, he appears with the gunmen while Cleo is shopping for a crib. Her waters break, and her daughter is stillborn after the journey to hospital. Sofía takes Cleo and the children to the coast and explains that their father is leaving. Cleo rescues two children from dangerous surf despite being unable to swim. After an emotional embrace and confession of grief, she returns with the family to a changed home and resumes her work.

Roma's household is a useful place to begin understanding its world because affection and inequality exist there together. Cleo's importance is visible in the lives depending on her, yet importance is not the same as authority. Caring for children can create an intimate bond without giving a worker the security or freedom enjoyed by their parents. The film makes it possible to recognise love in these relationships while still asking how they are organised. There is no need to choose one explanation and erase the other. A family can genuinely value someone whose labour it takes for granted, and that tension shapes what belonging means within the home.

The attention given to domestic life changes the scale on which a story can seem significant. Tasks that keep a household functioning are repetitive by nature; their value often becomes obvious only when nobody performs them. Giving that work space in a film challenges the habit of treating it as background to somebody else's more important life. Cleo is not merely a witness who delivers information about the family. Her responsibilities determine how she moves through its world and what time remains for herself. Roma invites us to consider the difference between being constantly needed and being fully known. Those conditions can overlap, but one does not guarantee the other.

Cuarón's black-and-white photography gives this remembered world a distinctive form. Colour does not provide an immediate shortcut to atmosphere; space, light and the relationship between figures carry more of that work. The wide image can hold a person inside an environment that continues beyond the immediate subject of a conversation. That matters to a story about unequal lives sharing the same rooms and streets. A frame need not announce an argument to reveal who occupies the centre, who passes through and who maintains the surroundings. The visual approach encourages attention to coexistence: private feeling takes place within a material world whose routines do not pause to recognise it.

Sound supplies another route into that surrounding life. A city cannot be reduced to what the central character is looking at, and an immersive soundtrack can make its off-screen presence felt. The result invites a particular kind of attention, one which allows the world to remain larger than a single explanation. A domestic crisis and public activity can occur at once without becoming the same event. That is one reason the film's personal perspective does not make its setting merely decorative. Lives carry on near other lives, with different stakes and different degrees of protection. The audience can recognise that proximity before every connection becomes clear to the people involved.

Cleo and Sofía's experiences open up a difficult comparison between shared vulnerability and unequal resources. Both can face abandonment without occupying equivalent positions. Having a home, money or the authority to make household decisions changes how a person can respond to loss. The story leaves room for solidarity without pretending that solidarity abolishes class. That gives its emotional connections a more demanding meaning. Care may cross a social division while the division survives, and comfort may be sincere while remaining insufficient to change a person's circumstances. Understanding the women together therefore involves noticing both the feeling linking them and the conditions which make their choices different.

The historical setting brings another layer of responsibility. Roma's fictional characters live alongside a reconstruction of political violence, but their story is not a complete account of the period. Its value as drama lies in showing how events described at a national scale can enter an ordinary person's immediate surroundings. History need not arrive as a speech explaining itself. It can disturb an errand, narrow a route or alter the safety of a place previously understood through daily use. The personal and political meet through experience rather than a claim that one character represents everyone. Keeping that distinction intact allows the film to be attentive to a particular life without making that life an exhaustive history.

The return to domestic routine prevents the story from settling into a simple celebration of resilience. Surviving a crisis does not automatically rearrange every relationship or relieve the work waiting afterwards. The film can honour Cleo's care while leaving the audience to question how much care comes back to her. That unresolved balance gives its title's remembered neighbourhood a deeper meaning: a place contains both the tenderness people recall and arrangements they may have failed to understand at the time. Roma asks for sustained attention to those arrangements. Its emotional weight comes from allowing gratitude, grief and unequal belonging to remain present together, without forcing them into a convenient final lesson.