“Still are your lashes, and so is your heart.”

Alejandro González Iñárritu has always leaned into the darkness, contrasting the best and worst of the human condition. With Biutiful, he once again dives headfirst into the stark horrors of life, exploring the bleak realities of poverty, immigration, prostitution, parenthood, child abuse, exploitation, sickness, mortality, and so on. His personal touch is so brilliant that you feel every harsh word, every blunt realization, every loss of innocence like a punch in the gut. In his first work without screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, Iñárritu dispenses with the kaleidoscopic narratives and melodramatics of his earlier films and focuses in on the personal story of kind-hearted crook-cum-psychic Uxbal (Javier Bardem) who is rapidly succumbing to terminal cancer à la Kurosawa’s Ikiru. Unlike the director’s previous efforts—the ensemble pictures of the thematically-connected “death trilogy” (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel)—Biutiful takes a small-scale approach by focusing on its star, who brings a quiet intensity in what may be a career-best performance. Indeed, without the steady presence of Bardem, whose facial expressions and tones of voice convey immeasurable pain and regret, the melancholy aesthetic of Iñárritu that pervades narratively, visually, and aurally may have becoming overbearing rather than maintaining its heartbreakingly evocative effect throughout.

Bardem’s Uxbal is a low-level crook from Barcelona who lives by a perverted code of ethics. He’s a middleman in the designer knock-off trade, procuring sweatshop employment for Chinese immigrants and providing their forged facsimile products to a group of Africans who peddle them on the street for cheap. He rents his clairvoyance to mourning families, acting as a medium between the recently deceased and their loved ones. But he isn’t always in-tune with the spirit world and often finds himself taking money from the begrudging, tearful bereaved who feel they’ve been ripped off by a fraud. His estranged wife, Marambra (Maricel Álvarez), is a bipolar mess who prostitutes her body as a fallback occupation and appears entirely unfit to care for the couple’s children, Ana (Hanaa Bouchaib) and Mateo (Guillermo Estrella). Worse yet, his only blood relative, wealthy older brother Tito (Eduard Fernández), occasionally pays for Marambra’s services. If such a brutal set of circumstances weren’t enough to knock a man down for good, a diagnosis of terminal prostate cancer might do it.

As Uxbal lurches slowly but surely toward his inevitable demise, striving in vain to set his affairs in order before succumbing to the clutches of death, he turns introspective and retrospective. Iñárritu assaults the audience with haunting imagery and intricately designed soundscapes—heartbeats, ticking clocks, fizzling musical motifs, moths, dead birds, faces of the departed in reflective surfaces, etc. My favorite visual clue is the perpetually incomplete Basílica de la Sagrada Família. This lavish, symbolic style certainly telegraphs Uxbal’s physical decay and the futility of his last days. It might seem excessive, and yet, considered in conjunction with the commitment to poignancy in all other areas it feels correctly attuned.

There’s a clear focus on the character of Uxbal, which allows Iñárritu to ruminate on notions of mortality and regret, but he manages to engage familiar touchstone themes by tracing the threads of Uxbal’s acquaintances, both living and dead. A digressive storyline about an affair between two Chinese men, the harsh decisions required of a Sengalese couple when one is arrested and deported, and the living situation of a congregation of Chinese laborers provide a sense of the underclass’s plight and the harsh realities and choices facing the immigrant communities of Barcelona. In a series of grave conversations, Uxbal’s only friend Bea (Ana Wagener) helps prepare Uxbal to face the end of his life. He tells her that he cannot die if only because his children need him. “The universe will take care of them,” she says, an abhorrent consolation that Uxbal doesn’t buy. “Will the universe pay the rent and buy food?” he asks.

One would hope that Marambra could shape up and shoulder the burden of raising her children. But that is not in her nature. However pleasant and appealing family life may seem (a shared meal that ends with melted ice cream and a recitation to the children of how Uxbal introduced himself to their mother is particularly touching), she proves incapable of coexisting with Uxbal’s grim gravitas just as he cannot stand her unmoored lifestyle. And yet love exists even in this place of shadows. Moments before his death, Uxbal gives his daughter a ring that his father, whom he never knew, had given to his mother.

Even as he protests his own death, he prepares for it with as much dignity as he can muster. In the end, Biutiful offers no chance at redemption, but only the opportunity for Uxbal to loosen his grip on the world, to realize that he is not in control and that reality will not conform to the image in his mind. This is brought to bear with tremendous heartbreak when Uxbal purchases heaters for several dozen Chinese workers living in an abandoned warehouse. He elects to buy cheap gas heaters so he can put some money toward his children’s needs as well. No one thinks about the confined environment, and the heaters kick off enough carbon monoxide to kill everyone in the room while they sleep.

In a life saturated with death, it’s only when confronted with his own imminent demise that Uxbal finds himself transformed by the reality that his earthly life will end. His deepest regret is that he will not be there for his children just as his father was not there for him. When Tito decides to sell their father’s burial niche to make an extra buck, which requires exhuming the body that had been shipped back from Mexico, Uxbal confronts the man who had abandoned him all those years ago and allows grief to wash over him. Shortly thereafter, it is Uxbal’s father, younger in death than Uxbal himself, who guides him as he transitions to the afterlife. It’s a transcendent throughline that touches on a sadness that many feel when pondering the passage of time, the brevity of life, and the loss of those we cherish. It will remain lodged in my memory alongside a similar spiritual moment in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread.

Biutiful is a work of staggering quality. Thematically expansive yet deeply personal, narratively sprawling yet emotionally pointed, heartbreaking yet sublimely joyful. It’s a profound film that moves with a living, breathing vitality, traveling through the darkest of shadows but aimed toward the light.