Film Review: Màquina

The aging Winnebago at the center of Joaquim Adrià Pujol’s Màquina is both vehicle and pressure chamber.

Inside it are a father, a son, years of alcoholism, accumulated resentment, genuine affection and the dangerous hope that perhaps this time something might actually change. Outside stretches the American West — deserts, empty highways and enormous skies offering the illusion of limitless freedom to people who remain stubbornly trapped inside patterns they have carried for years.

That contradiction gives Pujol’s 90-minute experimental documentary its aching power.

Màquina follows members of Pujol’s own family as they travel toward Colorado in pursuit of psychedelic-assisted addiction treatment, primarily involving ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT. Yet Pujol is emphatic that the substances themselves are not the film’s answer. He has described the project as being fundamentally about the decision to change and about learning to separate love for a person from the addiction consuming them.

That distinction is essential.

A lesser documentary might seize on psychedelic treatment as its hook, building toward some transformative experience promising revelation, reconciliation and recovery. Màquina refuses the comfort of that structure. It understands that addiction does not behave according to the demands of three-act storytelling.

There is no single epiphany capable of repairing decades of damage.

There is only the possibility of beginning.

And sometimes beginning is excruciating.

Pujol's film is deeply personal. He lived with his father and brother during production, keeping the camera close enough and present long enough that, according to the filmmaker, it eventually seemed almost to disappear. He also acknowledges moments when his obligations as a son outweighed those of a director and he simply put the camera down. That tension — filmmaker versus family member, observer versus participant — is not a weakness of Màquina. It is arguably the film's defining ethical and emotional struggle.

Pujol cannot pretend to be objective.

Nor should he.

This is his family.

The alcoholism documented here has not happened conveniently outside the frame. It has shaped his own life, his anger, his fears and his understanding of love. Pujol has spoken openly about generational addiction within his family and the personal crisis that ultimately pushed him toward making the film.

As a result, the camera does not possess the detached curiosity of an outsider encountering addiction.

It knows this terrain.

That familiarity changes everything.

The filmmaker understands the exhausting cycle through which addiction can restructure an entire family around one person's behavior. Someone drinks. Someone worries. Someone rescues. Someone becomes angry. Someone forgives. Everyone promises things will change.

Then the machine starts again.

The title Màquina begins to feel increasingly appropriate as the documentary unfolds. Addiction functions almost mechanically: repetitive, relentless and capable of drawing everyone nearby into its moving parts. The addict may occupy the center, but codependency ensures that the machinery extends far beyond him.

And Màquina is as much about codependency as it is about alcohol.

That is where the film becomes considerably more complicated than a conventional recovery documentary.

Pujol recognizes that loving someone with an addiction can gradually mutate into believing that you are responsible for saving them. Concern becomes vigilance. Vigilance becomes control. Help becomes enabling. Eventually it becomes difficult to determine where one person's illness ends and another person's life begins.

The road trip gives that emotional entanglement physical form.

Father and son are literally enclosed together, traveling hundreds of miles through a landscape large enough to swallow them. They cannot retreat easily into separate houses, routines or defenses. The Winnebago demands proximity.

And proximity demands conversation.

Some of the documentary's most affecting passages emerge not from treatment itself but from that forced intimacy — the long stretches between destinations when nothing can be solved and there is nowhere else to go.

Pujol has said the journey took roughly a week to reach Colorado and another two weeks returning through small highways and backroads, often stopping in remote landscapes where conversations unfolded around fires without a conventional film crew surrounding the family.

That stripped-down approach suits the material.

There is something almost archetypal about the image of a father and son crossing the American West in search of healing. American cinema has long treated the road as a place where damaged people might outrun themselves.

Màquina knows better.

You bring yourself with you.

So does your father.

So does everything neither of you has managed to say.

The West therefore becomes less an escape than an enormous mirror.

Pujol’s strength as a cinematographer is crucial to making that metaphor work. His work behind the camera on Josh and Rebecca Tickell’s Groundswell was represented in the 2026 Cannes Film Festival’s Special Screenings selection, and Cannes officially credits Pujol for the film’s cinematography. In Màquina, that visual instinct is turned inward, away from a large-scale environmental documentary and toward something far more intimate.

The landscapes remain beautiful, but Pujol does not use beauty simply to make suffering picturesque.

Instead, scale becomes psychological.

A tiny RV crosses immense terrain.

A man wrestling with addiction stands beneath a sky indifferent to whether he changes.

Mountains do not become symbols of triumph merely because the documentary happens to photograph them beautifully.

Nature offers space.

What the family does inside that space remains their responsibility.

This restraint is important because Màquina deals with psychedelic-assisted treatment, a subject particularly vulnerable to simplistic storytelling. It would be easy to present alternative medicine either as miraculous salvation or reckless folly.

Pujol takes the more difficult path.

His documentary approaches the treatment through a harm-reduction framework, while the director himself has stressed that he does not consider the medicine a miracle cure. He describes it instead as an opportunity to interrupt patterns, with lasting change still dependent upon the individual.

That perspective keeps the film emotionally grounded.

Because the most important transformation in Màquina may not be whether a man stops drinking.

It may be whether his son stops believing he can make him stop.

Those are two very different forms of recovery.

One belongs to the addict.

The other belongs to the family.

Pujol has said that making the documentary ultimately helped him establish clearer boundaries with his father and separate his love for the man from his feelings about the addiction. That observation becomes one of the film's most quietly devastating ideas.

We often describe unconditional love as though it requires unconditional access.

Màquina challenges that assumption.

You can love someone and refuse to participate in their destruction.

You can hope for someone's recovery without making that recovery your responsibility.

You can forgive someone without pretending nothing happened.

And perhaps most painfully, you can accept a parent without receiving the parent you once wished they would become.

That is considerably less cinematic than the triumphant breakthrough audiences might expect from a recovery narrative.

It is also considerably more truthful.

The documentary's personal-essay qualities sometimes create an intentionally loose structure. Pujol himself has described Màquina as difficult to categorize — documentary, personal essay and, at moments, something almost dreamlike. Viewers expecting a rigorously journalistic investigation into psychedelic medicine may therefore find the film frustrating.

But that is not really the movie Pujol is making.

Treatment is the destination on the map.

Family is the subject.

The documentary is less concerned with proving a thesis about addiction medicine than with recording what happens when people who have spent years repeating the same emotional behaviors willingly enter a situation in which those behaviors can no longer remain comfortably hidden.

That does create an occasional tension between intimacy and indulgence. Personal documentaries always risk assuming the audience shares the filmmaker's emotional investment simply because the material is painful to those involved. Not every confession carries equal cinematic weight, and Màquina can occasionally linger where greater editorial distance might have sharpened the impact.

Yet the film earns considerable latitude because Pujol does not protect himself from scrutiny.

This is not the story of a heroic son rescuing his damaged father.

Pujol understands that codependency implicates everyone.

His desire to help can contain fear. His frustration can contain control. His anger can coexist with devotion. The emotional honesty comes from refusing to sort those impulses neatly. That is also why Màquina resists the easy vocabulary of inspirational recovery stories. There are no villains here. There is behavior that has caused harm. There are people exhausted by living around it. There are people who love one another and sometimes fail one another spectacularly.

And there is hope — though Pujol is careful about what kind.

Hope in Màquina is not certainty.

It is willingness. The willingness to get into the Winnebago. The willingness to cross the desert. The willingness to undergo treatment. The willingness to say what has remained unsaid. The willingness to establish boundaries that might once have felt like abandonment. The willingness to accept that another human being's life cannot finally be lived on their behalf.

That conception of hope gives Màquina its maturity.

By the time the road has stretched across the West and the family has confronted memories that cannot simply be medicated away, the documentary's central question has shifted. It is no longer merely: Can this man recover?

It becomes: Can this family stop organizing itself around whether he does?

That is a harder question.

And perhaps the more important one.

Pujol's directorial feature debut arrives after substantial work as a cinematographer, including Common Ground and the Cannes-selected Groundswell. What Màquina reveals is a filmmaker capable of turning that visual sophistication toward material almost painfully close to home.

There are gorgeous images here, but the courage of the film is not found in its vistas.

It is found in staying inside the RV.

In remaining present when conversation becomes uncomfortable.

In recognizing when the camera should continue rolling.

And, just as importantly, knowing when being someone's son matters more than getting the shot.

 Raw, lyrical and frequently difficult to watch, Màquina is less a documentary about psychedelic treatment than a deeply personal examination of what addiction does to the people orbiting it. Joaquim Adrià Pujol transforms a father-son journey across the American West into a meditation on codependency, inherited damage and the brutal difference between loving someone and believing you can save them. The film refuses miraculous recovery in favor of something smaller and ultimately more persuasive: the possibility that healing begins when everyone involved stops waiting for one extraordinary moment to fix what years have broken.