The Ultimate Border: Mobility, Spirituality, and Death in Iñárritu's Biutiful

Biutiful is the first of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s films to introduce the supernatural and focus on one single protagonist, Uxbal. The film makes a political commentary by showing the slums of Barcelona, where impoverished citizens and undocumented migrants coexist. Through Uxbal’s visions of ghosts, the supernatural enters the most marginalised sectors of Barcelona. While popular narratives often relate mobility to liberation and transformative experiences, Biutiful problematizes this understanding of displacement. This paper analyses how the film articulates borders both literally and allegorically. Through mobility and border theory I explore how socio-political conditions intertwine with the supernatural and how they determine the characters’ access to spiritual experiences. This article also explores how mobility intermingles with spiritual experiences, the supernatural, and death. I rely on the ‘spectral turn’ to examine how ghosts in Biutiful serve to make a socio-political commentary. Lastly, this article explores the use of focalisation in the film to represent the supernatural through Uxbal’s visions. Biutiful engages mobility and spirituality in a way that is symptomatic of the asymmetric power dynamics of globalisation. It represents displacement as a navigation within the social fabric of the global system in which spiritual experiences seem elusive.

Draft of the article published on the Hispanic Research Journal, 2022.