Mistura is set in 1960s Lima and built around a premise that has powered better films: a person with no business being in a kitchen opens a restaurant on a deadline and discovers something about themselves. The deadline here is four months before the bank repossesses the house. The discovery involves Peru's cultural diversity and the virtues of collaboration. You've seen this arc. The question is always whether the execution earns the familiarity. It mostly doesn't. The problem is Norma, played by Bárbara Mori with an immaculate Jackie Onassis surface — enormous sunglasses, armour-thick makeup, blow-dry that could survive a Lima earthquake — and very little underneath. When her husband leaves her for a beauty queen at the film's opening, you reach for sympathy and find it intercepted by scenes of Norma lashing out at her housekeeper Rosa and chauffeur Oscar. The film needs us to tolerate her long enough to watch her change. It miscalculates how long that tolerance will hold. Oscar — played by Cesar Ballumbrosio, who is quietly the film's most interesting presence — is a bit in love with Norma and suggests she open the house as a restaurant to cover the mortgage. The script notes that Norma's father was the French ambassador to Peru and that she inherited his passion for gastronomy. It then slightly contradicts this by having Oscar observe he's never seen her light the oven. These aren't fatal inconsistencies, but they signal a screenplay that hasn't fully committed to its own backstory. The restaurant opens. Early reviews call the French cuisine a bit traditional. The dining room runs half-empty. Lessons about teamwork and embracing Peru's multicultural culinary identity — embodied in a Japanese-Peruvian sous-chef — are presumably incoming. But the film's pace is the real obstacle. Where the restaurant-drama genre typically generates tension from heat and pressure, Mistura maintains what the Guardian's reviewer correctly calls a gentle simmer. Sedate and elegant. Those are not the wrong words. They are also not what this story requires. The cinematography and period production design are genuinely good — this is not a cheap film, and it doesn't look like one. The 1960s Lima milieu is rendered with care. What's absent is any sense that the story could go wrong, that Norma's gamble might actually fail, that the characters sharing her orbit might matter beyond their function as catalysts for her arc. Without that stakes-sense, the film's elegance reads as emotional insulation rather than craft. Mistura opens in UK and Irish cinemas from 16 October. It will find an audience among viewers who enjoy food-as-metaphor cinema and don't require the kitchen to be on fire. For everyone else, the gentle simmer may be the thing that breaks the deal.
