The HSBC Spanish Film Festival 2025 is currently touring eight Australian cities, showcasing a range of new Spanish and Latin American films. Ibon Cormenzana’s The Bus of Life (El bus de la vida) is an engaging comedy-drama screening as part of the festival: it plays a lot of familiar beats, but to its credit it plays them very well. This is the sort of comfort cinema that absolutely has to be well-produced in order to work, and there is a creditable combination of writing, direction, and performance at play here to ensure that happens.

Andrés (Dani Rovira) is an aspiring composer and substitute music teacher whose arrival in a small Basque town coincides with his diagnosis of a malignant tumour in his ear. To commute into Bilbao each day to receive chemo and radiotherapy, Andrés boards a ramshackle old bus populated by a variety of cancer patients.

This is the point where many readers will realise that they have been here before, and potentially several times. There is drama to The Bus of Life, since it is dealing with people living and dying with cancer. There is also comedy, since the titular bus is packed with a familiar cast of colourful eccentrics. There is motherly philosopher Manuela (Elena Irureta), irascible old man Santi (Antonio Durán “Morris”), pot-growing teenager Unai (Pablo Scapigliati), among others. The bus is driven by local farmer and enthused volunteer Mai (Susana Abaitua), who is also renting out her apartment to Andrés. It is obvious from even the promotional poster that Mai and Andrés will fall in love. It is that kind of a film, and recognising the obvious destination does not stop the viewer from enjoying the journey there.

When considering a feature film for review, the critical question is not ‘is this film any good?’, but rather ‘is this film any good at what it is trying to be?’ The Bus of Life is deliberately populist cinema, with a warm and humorous take on a widely experienced situation. The characters are archetypes. The narrative is deliberately familiar. There are plenty of cinema enthusiasts who would prefer to avoid this kind of commercial sentimentality like the plague, and they are right to recognise this is not a film they are going to enjoy. Conversely there is a big audience for this kind of heart-warming film, and for that cohort it is important to know that this is an excellent example of the form. The screenplay, by Cormenzana and Eduard Sola Guerrero, is cleverly structured and foreshadowed throughout. Its only real ‘wobble’, so to speak, is a somewhat superficial and unrealistic depiction of the commercial music industry towards the third act. It seems like the film’s writers recognise this weakness too, since the film cannot resist closing that particular storyline as abruptly as it opens it.

The real pleasure is in riding the bus with such a likeable gang of characters, and sharing in their humour and their grief – and in recognising just how closely entwined these extremes of emotion can become. This is a slickly crafted, very likeable film.