Albert Goya asked me to take a second look at Noblestone, perhaps because the film has undergone changes since I first reviewed it. I was pleased to return to it. My central criticism, however, remains unchanged: the casting is wrong for the material. The performances do not yet possess the strength, distinction, or emotional authority required to carry the complicated psychological contest Goya has imagined.
And yet, on a second viewing, I found myself even more impressed by the young filmmaker behind it.
Goya is a nineteen-year-old British-Spanish filmmaker—young with a capital Y—and Noblestone is only his second feature. He wrote, directed, produced, edited, scored, and photographed the film himself. Such a collection of credits can sometimes signal youthful vanity, the belief that one pair of hands must control everything. In Goya’s case, it feels closer to hunger. He wants to know what every piece of the cinematic machine can do. More importantly, he wants to make films badly enough to build the machine himself.
That determination matters. Here is a filmmaker following his dream before the world has given him much permission, money, or assistance. He made Noblestone without a budget, over two years, with his sister, Lucia Goya-Betts, portraying both principal characters. The limitations of that arrangement are visible, but so is the resourcefulness behind it. Goya did not wait for ideal circumstances.
He worked with what he had and pushed the material as far as he could.
That instinct—the refusal to wait—is often where filmmakers begin.
Noblestone opens with a silhouette and a recollection. A woman describes encountering someone on a railway track, crying out for a friend who has disappeared. The image is spare, peculiar, and unsettling. When the film eventually returns to it, what first seemed like a memory has taken on the force of a premonition.
Karen has been hired as the live-in housemaid of an artist whose name is never revealed. Their arrangement is professional only in theory. The two women discuss art, morality, justice, punishment, and compassion, while the artist begins recording her impressions of Karen in a diary. She regards her new employee as pleasant but unsophisticated, a woman seemingly untouched by serious artistic ambition. The judgment tells us less about Karen than it does about the artist’s vanity and her need to feel exceptional.
Their relationship shifts when Karen plays a song on the piano and claims to have written it. The music moves the artist more deeply than she wishes to admit. Soon afterward, she shows Karen one of her paintings and is quietly wounded by the response. Admiration, envy, resentment, and dependency begin circling one another. In this house, affection is never far from humiliation.
Karen eventually confesses that she lied about never having worked as a housemaid. She had once been employed by another woman, she explains, until an argument sent her employer fleeing from the house. Karen followed but lost her. She can no longer recall the woman’s face or name, only the sensation of having been abandoned.
When the artist retreats to a second home in search of solitude, she discovers that Karen has followed her. The diary has been moved. Karen’s supposedly original song is heard playing on the radio. Deceptions accumulate, and the film enters a stranger, more violent register. Karen destroys one of the artist’s drawings; the artist retaliates by serving her a sandwich filled with broken glass.
From there, chronology loosens. Violence occurs, recedes, and appears to begin again. Karen threatens the artist with a knife. The artist awakens elsewhere, writes a letter, and disappears. Karen’s search returns her to the railway track, where she becomes the woman from the opening image, calling after someone who will not return.
The film has been described as a slow, atmospheric comedy, though its humor is dry and unnerving, lodged somewhere between absurdity and menace. Its deeper concern is the unstable exchange between dependence and control: the employer who believes herself superior to the servant, the servant who begins to occupy the employer’s imagination, and the artist who demands admiration while pretending to exist above such ordinary needs.
Goya’s intelligence is visible in the questions he chooses to ask. Who is entitled to call herself an artist? What happens when admiration becomes possession? Can compassion survive vanity? Can one person truly see another without turning her into material?
These are not small questions for a second feature, particularly one made by a teenager.
The problem is that Noblestone requires actors capable of sustaining its silences and making its shifting alliances emotionally legible. The two women must feel wholly distinct—separated by class, temperament, desire, and their competing ideas of power. The dual casting instead keeps reminding us of the film’s practical circumstances. At moments when we should be consumed by two people moving toward psychological catastrophe, we are conscious of a production solving a problem.
I stood by that criticism after my first viewing, and I stand by it now. Goya needs a strong casting director, someone with the judgment and relationships to connect him with actors who can fully inhabit the complexity of his ideas. He also needs performers unafraid of silence, contradiction, and emotional ugliness. Stronger actors would not merely improve the film’s surface. They would allow Goya’s intentions to become flesh.
I sincerely hope he finds those collaborators. Because the filmmaker has the "it" factor, and that can't be bought or faked.
As a cinematographer, Goya demonstrates an instinctive understanding of composition, shadow, and atmosphere. He knows how a doorway can divide two people before a word is spoken. He understands that an empty room can retain the residue of an argument, and that a face concealed in darkness may carry more force than one plainly shown. His visual choices are not decorative. They are the film’s most persuasive language.
There is sensitivity in the way he observes the women, even when his reach exceeds his present command. There is insight in his interest in artistic insecurity and the cruelties it can produce. And there is grit in the very existence of the film: a no-budget feature completed over two years by someone who had barely entered adulthood.
Determination alone does not make a great artist. Plenty of people are determined. What makes Goya worth watching is that his persistence is joined by genuine visual intelligence. He has an eye. He has ideas. He has something he is trying to say, and one senses that keeping silent was never a serious option for him.
That is why this second look mattered.
Noblestone is not yet the film Goya may have imagined, and my concerns about its casting remain. But criticism should not prevent us from recognizing promise when it appears, particularly when that promise arrives with this much audacity, labor, and heart.
Discovering a filmmaker at this stage—young, imperfect, stubbornly ambitious, and already reaching beyond his resources—is the kind of thing that warms my heart. One hopes to witness talent before it has been polished into predictability, when the desire is still raw, and the path ahead is enormous.
Based on the intelligence of the material, the strength of Goya’s visual instincts, and his obvious commitment to the work, I see big things on that horizon. He has much to learn, as every young filmmaker does, but he is already moving. With the right casting director, stronger actors, and experienced collaborators who understand rather than dilute his sensibility, he may move very far indeed.
Albert Goya is a British-Spanish filmmaker, cinematographer, and producer to keep an eye on. He is following his dream with both hands, and at nineteen, he has already made two feature films.
That is not merely impressive.
It is the beginning of something very special. Lean in and follow his journey; I have a feeling no one will be disappointed.
'Noblestone' is Albert Goya's second feature film.
Credits
Director
Albert Goya
Producer
Albert Goya
Cast
Lucia-Goya-Betts
Cinematographer
Albert Goya
“British-Spanish filmmaker Albert Goya is a striking young cinematic talent—a determined visual storyteller with intelligence, sensitivity, grit, and the promise of big things ahead.”
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