Spanish filmmaker Martínez Bayona explores mortality and aging in Cannes debut

At Cannes, Spanish director María Martínez Bayona has brought her debut film 'The End of It' — a science fiction meditation on mortality, aging, and the cultural machinery that treats the passage of time as a defect to be corrected. Her work arrives at a moment when the fear of growing old has migrated from adult vanity into childhood, with children as young as ten reaching for anti-aging products. In placing this reality within speculative fiction, Martínez Bayona asks what a civilization quietly surrenders when it mistakes the erasure of age for the preservation of life.