Roma (2018) Review: Cuarón's Memory in Black and White

Is Roma worth watching?

Yes. Roma is a masterful, deeply moving film that turns the everyday life of one domestic worker into something epic, and it is among the finest work of Alfonso Cuarón’s career. Its long, gliding shots and immersive sound make early-1970s Mexico City feel fully alive, and Yalitza Aparicio’s quiet performance holds the whole thing together. The reservation is its pace: this is a film that observes rather than propels, and the first hour asks for patience before its emotional power fully arrives.

What is Roma about?

Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) is a young Indigenous woman who works as a live-in maid for a middle-class family in the Colonia Roma neighbourhood of Mexico City in the early 1970s. She cooks, cleans, wakes the four children and puts them to bed, and she shares small moments of friendship with the other housekeeper. The household’s mother, Sofía (Marina de Tavira), is coping with a marriage in trouble, and as the family’s world shifts, Cleo faces a personal crisis of her own, all against a backdrop of political unrest in the city.

Roma was written, directed and photographed by Alfonso Cuarón, drawing on memories of his own childhood. It is a Mexican production in Spanish and Mixtec, runs 135 minutes, won the Golden Lion at the 2018 Venice Film Festival, and took Academy Awards for Best Director, Best Cinematography and Best International Feature Film.

Every frame a remembered room

Cuarón shoots Roma in widescreen black and white, often in long, slow lateral pans that move across rooms and streets like a memory scanning its surroundings. The effect is to give a small domestic world the scale of an epic. A family car squeezing into a narrow garage, a cinema full of people, a crowded street during a demonstration: each is composed with such depth that the eye can wander and discover details at the edges of the frame.

The sound design is just as immersive. Planes pass overhead, street vendors call out, dogs bark, water splashes across tiles, and all of it is layered so precisely that the city feels present in every scene. There is no conventional score, which makes the ambient world all the more vivid.

Aparicio’s stillness at the centre

Yalitza Aparicio, a first-time actor, gives Cleo a reserved, attentive presence. She rarely speaks at length, and much of her performance is in how she listens, waits and absorbs what is happening around her. It is a remarkably unforced piece of acting, and when the film finally allows her emotion to break through, the effect is devastating.

Marina de Tavira matches her as Sofía, a woman whose anger and panic spill out in ways that sometimes land on the people who depend on her. Their relationship, affectionate yet shaped by an unbridgeable difference in power, is the film’s quiet subject.

The limits of a loving gaze

Roma’s great strength is its precision of memory, and that is also the source of its most discussed limitation. The film is told from the vantage point of the family Cleo serves, and while it is deeply sympathetic to her, her inner life remains partly closed off. Some viewers find that a respectful restraint; others feel it keeps her at a distance, admired rather than fully known. The film’s deliberate rhythm, especially in its early domestic routines, can also test viewers who prefer strong narrative momentum.

Who should watch Roma?

It is essential for admirers of art-house and world cinema, anyone interested in Mexican history or Cuarón’s filmography, and viewers who respond to films built on atmosphere and detail. Set aside a little over two hours without distractions, and a large screen if you can. The film includes brief full-frontal nudity, a distressing medical sequence and scenes of political violence, making it best suited to adults.

If Roma speaks to you:

• Y Tu Mamá También, Cuarón’s earlier Mexican road movie, which also lets the country’s social realities hover at the edges of an intimate story.
• Amores Perros, a more ferocious portrait of Mexico City from another major director of the same generation.
• Macario, a black-and-white Mexican classic for a glimpse of the national cinema Roma draws on.

The verdict

Roma is a work of rare beauty and emotional depth, a personal memory expanded into a portrait of a city, a class system and a woman’s quiet resilience. Its slow pace and the distance it keeps from Cleo’s inner world will not suit everyone, but few films have made ordinary life look so monumental.

Rating: 4.5/5