THE ANSWERING MACHINE

José Cortes’s The Answering Machine opens like a confessional whispered into the dark. It invites us into the quiet ache of a life once filled with applause—a German opera singer, trapped between the grandeur of her art and the silence of her home. What follows is not merely a film, but a recital of vulnerability, an aria of pain, and, ultimately, a reclamation of self. The premise is deceptively simple: a woman, haunted by expectation. The expectations of her family. The demands of the opera world. The unrelenting standard she has built within herself. And yet, in the stillness of her domestic solitude, something unravels—and something else begins to mend. Cortés films this transformation with intimacy. The camerawork is assured, the editing taut. Each cut lands like a breath between phrases of music. Yet there is an unmistakable theatrical quality to it all—The Answering Machine often feels like a filmed monodrama, a stage performance translated into cinema. This isn’t a flaw so much as a choice; the boundaries between theatre and film blur, creating a hybrid space where performance and confession become one. At the center of it all stands Ivon Mateljan, and she is extraordinary. Her singing is exquisite, but it’s her silence that devastates. She wears her fragility like an aria—controlled, expressive, utterly human. The camera adores her not for her perfection, but for her willingness to crumble before it. Few performances dare to be this naked. What begins as a story of failure becomes something far more resonant: the courage to start again. Cortés doesn’t offer easy catharsis or melodrama. Instead, he gives us a portrait of quiet reinvention, where art becomes a mirror for pain—and a passage through it. By the end, The Answering Machine leaves us not with applause, but with a kind of reverent silence. The performance is over, but the echo remains.

Cortés’s premise is spare — a woman, an empty home, and the echoes of what was — yet within this austerity he locates something vast and symphonic.
Each gesture, each pause, feels choreographed to the rhythm of loss. The film becomes less a narrative than a composition: a cinematic sonata in minor key, written for light, breath, and the trembling of human will. Cortés’s direction balances the cerebral and the sensual with remarkable poise. His camera neither intrudes nor embellishes; it watches, almost reverently, as the performer slowly sheds her mask—her art and her suffering merging into one. The editing is musical — cuts arrive like inhalations between verses, allowing emotion to resonate in the air.
There is a deliberate theatricality here, as if the frame itself were a proscenium arch; but instead of distancing us, it transforms the screen into an intimate confessional where performance and truth become indistinguishable. Ivon Mateljan’s portrayal is nothing short of alchemical. Her face becomes a terrain of micro-expressions, every flicker of doubt or resignation caught in chiaroscuro light.
Beneath its minimalist exterior, The Answering Machine is a meditation on the existential cost of artistry. Cortés refuses sentimentality; he offers, instead, revelation. The film suggests that creation is not simply an act of expression, but an act of endurance — a way of surviving the silence after the curtain falls. In that silence, Cortés achieves what few filmmakers dare: he transforms solitude into symphony.