Milena Smit

In Parallel Mothers (2021), watch how Milena Smit holds her place beside Penélope Cruz during their wordless exchanges. As Ana, she allows the attention to move between them without pushing for a reaction of her own. We were moved by those silences because neither actor needed a speech to make us care about the connection. Smit is attentive without making a performance of listening, and the scene belongs to both of them.

She arrived at Pedro Almodóvar's film after her feature debut as Mila in David Victori's Cross the Line (2020). The move to Ana matters more than the speed of that progression: it gave her scenes opposite Cruz that depended on what passed between them. Her subsequent work has included the horror lead in Tin & Tina (2023), the crime series The Snow Girl (2023) and the dystopian sequel The Platform 2 (2024). These parts sit within a pattern of young women dealing with loss, danger or difficult circumstances. There is a risk of casting her only when someone needs to suffer.

Almodóvar gets good work from Smit by allowing that restraint to count. With Cruz keeping Janis's distress contained, there is no need for Ana to answer it with a more conspicuous performance. The film's middle drifts, but the women give us a reason to stay with it. The limits of what an actor can do are clearer in The Platform 2, where uneven pacing and underdeveloped backstory leave more work for the performers. Smit's vulnerability is useful here, but it cannot supply a character's missing history.

Her return to Almodóvar as Natalia in Bitter Christmas (2026) comes with a caveat. The film is handsome and often funny, but it sags through the middle and leaves too much until its last half hour. Bárbara Lennie does the carrying here. For Smit, we would sooner return to the scenes with Cruz that give us two performances to attend to at once. Start with Parallel Mothers, and watch both sides of the conversation.