A teenager stands between her family and an unseen threat in Totem, a 2023 supernatural thriller from director Lila Avilés.
What is Totem about?
The story follows a teenage girl who realizes her family is under threat from something she cannot fully explain, and who decides she has to act rather than wait for the adults around her to notice. Set within the close quarters of a household under strain, the film uses the framework of a supernatural mystery to explore how a young person can read danger long before anyone else in the room does. As the pressure builds, she turns to increasingly drastic steps to keep the people she loves from harm, and the film tracks the toll that vigilance takes on someone who is still, in every other respect, a kid. Totem keeps its focus tight on her perspective, letting the household itself become the stage for a slow-building sense of dread rather than relying on any single big scare.
About the cast
Naíma Sentíes carries the film in the lead role, supported by an ensemble that includes Montserrat Marañon, Marisol Gasé, Saori Gurza, Mateo García Elizondo, Teresa Sánchez, Juan Francisco Maldonado and Iazua Larios. Lila Avilés directs, working across a co-production between Denmark, France and Mexico that gives an internationally financed crew room to tell a very intimate, single-household story.
Context & significance
Totem sits at the intersection of horror, mystery and thriller, a combination that lets it move between quiet dread and moments of open confrontation rather than settling into one register. The Denmark-France-Mexico co-production reflects how festival-oriented genre films are increasingly financed across borders, pooling resources from several countries to support a story that is otherwise small in scale and grounded in one family's home. Running a lean 89 minutes, the film doesn't pad its premise; it stays close to its teenage protagonist and lets her point of view set the pace from start to finish.
Watching Totem on Ktime
Totem streams on K-Time with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles both available, so viewers can choose whichever fits how they like to watch. Access just requires a free K-Time account login — no extra purchase, no separate download. The platform is built with the Farsi-speaking audience in mind, so the interface, search and recommendations are all designed to feel native for Persian-speaking viewers of the diaspora.