Parallel Mothers

Parallel Mothers (Madres paralelas, 2021) is Pedro Almodóvar's Spanish drama, and you can watch online on iFILM. Two single women share a maternity ward: Janis, a confident photographer in her forties, and Ana, a frightened teenager barely ready for any of it.

They give birth to daughters on the same day, then go home to separate lives — neither aware that a hospital mix-up has bound them together for good. Penélope Cruz plays Janis as a woman clinging to a truth she's terrified to say out loud, while Milena Smit's Ana is her fragile opposite, still half a child herself. Running underneath it all is a second thread: Janis is fighting to exhume a Civil War mass grave where her great-grandfather was buried.

Almodóvar braids an intimate melodrama about swapped babies with a country reckoning with the dead it spent decades refusing to name. The role landed Cruz the Volpi Cup at Venice and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. For anyone drawn to saturated color, complicated women and a director unafraid of big emotion, this one lingers. Stream Parallel Mothers (2021) online on iFILM.