A daughter’s return home, after many years’ estrangement, to announce her engagement coincides with a catastrophe in her family’s poultry business. These two events set off a chain reaction that will either unite or destroy her fractious clan, in Puerto Rican writer-director Carla Cavina Meléndez’s dazzling, indelible feature debut.

Long at war with her authoritarian father, Arcadio (Sunshine Logroño), astrophysicist Teresa (Marisé Alvarez) puts her coming out on hold to help him save his company when new trade regulations and corrupt officials threaten its existence. In the meantime, Teresa’s mother, Genoveva (Elba Escobar); sister, Andrea (Laura Aleman); and brother, Junior (Yamil Callazo), all have secrets of their own, and her young, space-obsessed nephew, Andrés (Mauricio Alemañy), is working on a furtive project.

What Teresa and her fiancée, Daniela (Prakriti Marduro), study through their high-powered telescope on the Canary Islands is the Andromeda galaxy, and Cavina Meléndez punctuates her elegant, impeccably acted domestic drama with gorgeous shots of fiery, exploding stars. The meaning of these images and the film’s title is clear: these people are aliens, to one another, certainly, but also to themselves. When Daniela arrives to reunite with Teresa at the same time Andrés puts a dangerous plan in motion, the stage is set for an explosion that will either bring the family together or jolt them into separate trajectories.

— PAM GRADY