Instructions Not Included sneaks up on you. Not quietly. More like it tiptoes toward you in flip-flops, trips over a chair, knocks over a lamp, and then bursts into tears while insisting it’s fine, absolutely fine. And before you know it, you’re comforting the movie instead of it comforting you.
It’s chaotic. Not bad-chaotic — just… it’s a lot. Eugenio Derbez is directing his first feature here, and you can feel him reaching for something big and heartfelt and cross-cultural and occasionally too ambitious for its own frame. I respect the attempt. It’s messy, but it’s a human mess.
Derbez plays Valentín with this bumbling, exhausted tenderness that actually got to me. You can see him trying to hold together the plot, his daughter’s life, his stunt career, and whatever’s happening with his childhood trauma — which is a lot for someone who cannot successfully operate a toaster.
Loreto Peralta is Maggie, the daughter, who is just… stunningly good. Not “good for a kid.” Good, full stop. She has that alchemical ability to make the emotional beats feel real even when the movie is flinging tonal curveballs all over the field. Any time the film threatens to buckle under its own sentimentality, she just looks at her dad with those massive, honest eyes, and suddenly I’m forgiving everything.
So yeah, the movie is all over the place. The jokes linger longer than they should, and the dramatic turns feel like someone changed the channel without warning. And that ending — I mean, look, no spoilers, and you’ll probably see it coming miles out, but it hit me like someone threw a bowling ball at my chest while screaming, “THIS IS FOR YOUR PERSONAL GROWTH.”
Did the movie earn that moment? I don’t know. Again, it calls its shots something fierce, this movie. But, I’ll be thinking about it for a while, which is something.
And still — I liked it. I found myself rooting for it, because there’s an earnestness here that plays. It’s a film that genuinely feels things, even when it doesn’t quite know how to express them cleanly. Its heart is enormous, its technique is wobbly, and the combination ends up being charming. So yes, it’s manipulative. And uneven. And occasionally baffling. But it’s also sweet, and deeply human, and surprisingly tender.