Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch A Poet
2025 · Simón Mesa Soto · A Poet on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Ubeimar Ríos hold both dignity and absurdity in his face. (performance)
Ríos, a non-professional, plays Oscar through physical presence and expression rather than dialogue alone, so you can never fully settle into mocking him or admiring him.
Payoff: The performance holds both readings at once, which is harder than choosing either one.
Notice the camera's sober distance from Oscar's indignities. (camera)
Sarmiento holds back from close-up commentary, letting Oscar's small vanities and embarrassments play out in the frame without the camera nudging you toward a reaction.
Payoff: You get to decide for yourself when to laugh and when to wince.
Watch the shabby, unglamorous rooms where the poetry scene meets. (setting)
Mesa Soto shoots in real Medellín apartments, cafés, and schools, letting the gap between Oscar's self-image and his actual surroundings show up in the location itself.
Payoff: The rooms puncture his romantic self-conception before a single character gets the chance to.
Listen for the melancholic piano under the comedy. (sound)
Matti Bye's score leans wistful and ironic rather than broadly comic, refusing to cue easy laughs at Oscar's humiliations.
Payoff: The music keeps telling you this is sadder than the scene alone would let on.
Once you have seen it
Notice how the film never fully resolves Oscar's motives with Yurlady. (structure)
The mentorship reads as generosity, vicarious ambition, and ethical hazard all at once, and the film refuses to pick one explanation and settle there.
Payoff: Watching again, you can hold all three readings of the relationship at the same time.
Watch how long the film lets an awkward beat run. (cutting)
Saravia's cut allows scenes to sit in mortification rather than resolving it quickly, and that patience is what turns embarrassment into pathos.
Payoff: Where the edit chooses to cut, or not to, is doing as much of the tragicomedy as the writing.
Watch Yurlady's face when Oscar isn't looking at her. (performance)
Rebeca Andrade carries the film's ethical charge in small reactions, the moments that register what mentorship is actually costing a teenager exposed to a compromised adult world.
Payoff: On a second watch her reactions carry as much weight as anything Oscar says about himself.
Carry this in: Watch Oscar's face for what it's doing, not what the scene is telling you to feel about him.