A review of David Turpin’s Ancestors
“Who’s going to watch me disappear?” — Ancestors, David Turpin
Some time this summer, I found myself descending into a certain literary rabbit hole: Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca’s lecture Play and Theory of the Duende. It was first delivered by Lorca in Argentina in 1933 and describes the strange, wondrous concept of ‘duende.’ In Spanish folk tradition, a duende (or duende de casa) is a mischievous, wicked creature that haunts domestic spaces, wreaking havoc and harm; Lorca’s lecture, however, introduces a double meaning of the word. As Lorca quotes Manuel Torre, “All that has dark sounds has duende.” Duende is the tone/feeling/spirit that artists are invariably searching for; it is the best-kept secret of every profound piece of art. To put it simply, duende is something that cannot arrive without the possibility of death. It requires, in finality, the artist’s awareness of mortality, of the temporality of certain things.
I’m not quite sure if duende is the secret to all meaningful art. It very well could be. But after my descent and ascent from the duende rabbit hole, I didn’t give the subject much more thought until I watched one of the films from the TIFF ‘26 Discovery programme: David Turpin’s Ancestors.
Ancestors is, first and foremost, a story about a search. It is set in the 1980s and follows Beau (Éanna Hardwicke), a gay Irishman who has relocated to London from his homeland due to the criminalization of homosexuality in Ireland. He lives with his best friend, Shell (Jessica Reynolds), and works at a neighborhood cafe run by queer ‘auntie’ Maurice (Rupert Everett). His quiet life is slightly upended when Tiny (Jack Wolfe) arrives at the cafe one day; Tiny and Beau slowly progress from a begrudging friendship to a found brotherhood. That is, until Tiny suddenly disappears. As Beau stumbles through London looking for him, his reality begins to entangle with myth, with dream. It slowly becomes clear that Tiny’s disappearance is linked to the vanishing of an entire generation of queer men, as a product of the ever-looming AIDS epidemic.
One of the preliminary scenes features Tiny and Beau as they sit together in Beau’s flat. Beau pours Tiny’s tea and lays out a myriad of his favourite mystery novels on the kitchen table, urging Tiny to read them. “I don’t really like detective stories,” Tiny responds. “I like love stories, and ghost stories.” Perhaps this serves as a sort of clue: an indication that the film, which begins as a detective story (a story formed from facts, from well-defined constructs), will soon crumble into a story of mist and dreams, a story built from the spirits and bones of the world.
/Ancestors/’ love story does not belong to paragons or heroes, to great people who do great things. Instead, it is about nobodies, nowheres, and nothings. As I watched, a verse from a Richard Siken poem sprang to mind: “There are many names in history / but none of them are ours.” /Ancestors/ meditates on the lines of love that exist between people lost in time, space, and memory. It is a film that is shaped by absences, by missing things and gaping holes. The scenes that carved out these holes were the ones that moved me the most; I remember the inexplicable dread I felt as I watched Beau sit on Tiny’s empty bed, hugging Tiny’s jacket to his chest.
The film also emphasizes the presence of shame and its deep historical entanglement with queer identity and queer belonging. Éanna Hardwicke poignantly embodies this shame in Beau—it emanates from every word that he says, every emotion that lines his face. “I feel disgusting,” he says out loud once, in a scene set in a dim, crowded room. Shell appears then, a figure of warmth and light, a hand outstretched to pull him out of the dark. “You are disgusting,” she tells him. “But that’s why I love you.” The AIDS crisis (which continually haunts the heart of the film) has served as an influential perpetuator of queer shame and disgust. Perhaps /Ancestors/ is trying to propose that love is a worthy counter to that disgust. Perhaps everyone is disappearing and everyone is doomed, but the love was pure and the love was true.
Throughout the film, I became increasingly aware of one thing: Ancestors is eerily self-conscious. It is a ghost story that haunts itself, and I have never seen anything quite like it. It is a story that crushes you, that forges a physical weight in your chest.
To me, the entirety of the film thrums with Lorca’s duende, with the awareness of approaching death. There is a scene in which Tiny asks Beau, “Where do we go? People like us?” Beau assures him that neither of them would be going anywhere, but soon his dreams are riddled with black-and-white visions of Gloria (Christina Hendricks), a spirit of a movie star. As the film progresses, the black-and-white scenes become increasingly frequent. As the film gradually loses its colours, it seems to acquire its duende, its acknowledgement of mortality. It is as if, as Ancestors draws to its end, its contents and its characters are slowly fading into an old photograph, memorialized and mythologized in time.
The final scene of Ancestors is greyscaled, accompanied by a cover of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren,” which plays in the background as Beau finds what he has been searching for. As the music thrummed through the theatre, this song of dark sounds, I remember thinking that siren (like duende) also held a double meaning, one birthed from myth and one from reality. Sometimes a search is just a siren song—a hypnosis, a call towards an ending and towards death. Sometimes what you’re looking for is something you hoped you’d never find.