BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022)
Movie · 2022 · Comedy, Drama · 2h 39m · R · Spanish
Curator score: 4.3/10 (90.1K ratings)
Experience a state of mind.
Overview
A renowned Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker living in Los Angeles, after being named the recipient of a prestigious international award, is compelled to return to his native country, unaware that this simple trip will push him to an existential limit.
Ratings
Curator score: 4.3/10
IMDb: 6.7/10
Letterboxd: 3.53/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 60%
Metacritic: 55
TMDB: 6.8/10
Director
Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Production
M Productions, Redrum
Cast
Daniel Giménez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani, Íker Sánchez Solano, Ximena Lamadrid, Luz Jiménez, Luis Couturier, Francisco Rubio, Andrés Almeida, Clementina Guadarrama, Jay O. Sanders, Noé Hernández, Fabiola Guajardo, Mar Carrera, Rubén Zamora, Omar Leyva, Grace Shen, Edison Ruiz, Daniel Damuzi, Alex Guevara, Misha Arias De La Cantolla
Where to watch
Netflix, Netflix Standard with Ads
Curator Review
Verdict
A visually ambitious, self-searching surreal drama with flashes of real beauty and wit, but it’s also sprawling, repetitive, and deliberately self-indulgent. Best approached as a mood piece and personal essay rather than a tightly engineered story.
Best for
Viewers who like dreamlike, autobiographical cinema
Fans of big, expressive visual filmmaking
People interested in identity, memory, exile, and national belonging
Audiences patient with long, digressive, symbolic storytelling
Skip if
You want a lean, plot-driven narrative
You dislike overtly self-mythologizing films
You’re impatient with repetition and ambiguity
You prefer emotional directness over surreal abstraction
Overview
BARDO is the kind of film that announces its ambitions in every frame. It’s a memory labyrinth, a comedy of ego, and a melancholy meditation on return, privilege, parenthood, and national identity, all staged with the kind of visual confidence that makes even its excesses feel intentional. The movie’s strongest quality is its willingness to turn private anxiety into spectacle without sanding off the messiness.
Worth noting
At the same time, the film can feel like it’s circling its own obsessions. The surreal set pieces are often striking, sometimes hilarious, and occasionally breathtaking, but the repetition and length blunt the emotional impact. It asks for surrender more than agreement, and that will be exhilarating for some viewers and exhausting for others.
Bottom line
If you respond to cinema as a form of self-interrogation, BARDO has plenty to admire: image-making, performance, and a restless sense of identity in flux. If you need discipline, narrative momentum, or humility from your protagonists, it may test your patience. It’s a film to respect, argue with, and revisit selectively rather than a universally easy recommendation.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Jay (2.5★) · 2633 likes
its good, but if you were to put a gun to my head and force me to watch bardo again, id say shoot me
Ana V (5★) · 1171 likes
“La memoria carece de verdad, solo tiene coherencia emocional.”
What is identity if not the collection of our memories? What is life if not the strange journey that shapes it?
It’s fascinating how we are all victims of circumstance in a way, how perhaps we wouldn’t be the people we are if we had made one single different choice.
We are the product of what was, what is, what could have been - Alejandro González Iñárritu understands that better than… more
davidehrlich (2.5★) · 932 likes
“You inevitably turn into what people think you are,” someone opines a few hours (or years) into Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths),” a movie so nakedly personal in spite of its epic scope that even the most benign stray comments betray the sting of self-flagellation. And yet there’s a reason why this one manages to break the skin.
By this point in the film’s oneiric non-story, it’s already clear that Silverio (Daniel Giménez… more
Bruce Tetsuya (4.5★) · 641 likes
North American Premiere for Bardo. AGI introduced the film and described it in comparison to his other works as a snorkel, viewing from above, where there is still light, greys, and beauty, rather than a deep dive into the depths of the dark ocean.
To my surprise, this movie has been met with some mixed reviews. I thought for sure, after a 7 year hiatus, and after seeing this staggeringly beautiful and honest portrait of a man, it would be… more
jonathan fujii (2★) · 632 likes
Idk what’s up with Netflix movies and fetuses this year but I’m losing my mind