‘Barreda’ Review: Revisiting Argentina’s Most Infamous Family Massacre

More than thirty years after the events, the crimes committed by Ricardo Barreda—a dentist from the city of La Plata who murdered his wife, mother-in-law and two daughters in cold blood—may seem, in retrospect, like a case with little mystery or ambiguity. From the very beginning, it was clear that Barreda was the killer, and today it’s almost impossible to understand the strange social phenomenon that grew around him. But this happened at a time when the term femicide wasn’t yet part of the public conversation. Crimes like these were routinely dismissed as «crimes of passion» or treated as private family matters. What Barreda—and especially his defense team—managed to do was turn the perpetrator into something resembling the victim, framing his massacre as an almost justifiable act of retribution.

As one of the title cards in Daniela Goggi’s Barreda points out, very little is known—and even less discussed—about the four women he killed. Public attention has always centered on him, virtually erasing the lives he cut short. Barreda tries to shift that perspective by paying greater attention to the family as a whole, imagining the domestic reality that preceded the murders—a reality no one can truly reconstruct because the only surviving witness was the killer himself. However, the film never fully escapes its own premise. Between its title and the commanding central performance by Luis Machín, Goggi’s film inevitably remains a portrait of the murderer. The difference is that it sets out to dismantle the mythology Barreda built around himself: the image of a man driven to murder because he had been emasculated, humiliated and pushed beyond his limits.

The film portrays Barreda as an emotionally withdrawn, difficult man who struggled to communicate with his family. His wife and daughters feared him; only his mother-in-law dared confront him directly. Although they shared the same house, it often felt as though they inhabited parallel dimensions, occupying the same physical space while living in entirely different emotional worlds. That unsettling atmosphere helps explain the profound disconnect between Barreda and the women around him—a disconnect that may well have fueled his actions. Meticulous, orderly and emotionally distant, he seems far more comfortable with his patients and his extramarital affairs than with the women in his own household, who did everything they could to avoid him.

The story unfolds across two intersecting timelines. One follows Barreda’s arrest and trial, while the other gradually reconstructs the months leading up to the murders. The present-day timeline, set in 1992, focuses on the legal strategy devised by his lawyer (Marcelo Subiotto), who works to generate sympathy from both judges and public opinion by portraying Barreda as a man constantly belittled, mistreated and humiliated by the women in his family. Central to that strategy was the now-infamous nickname «Conchita»—used as a derogatory slur implying weakness and a lack of masculinity— which became inseparable from the case itself. For many men at the time, Barreda’s grievance felt recognizable: he had killed because the women in his family failed to give him the respect he believed he deserved. Goggi’s film, however, casts serious doubt on whether the humiliations described by Barreda and his lawyer ever happened in the way they claimed.

The flashbacks speculate about the family’s daily life before the murders: a household marked by awkward silences, emotional distance, passive aggression and mutual resentment—but not in the way Barreda’s public narrative suggested. This is where the film finds its most compelling angle, since there is almost no mystery left to solve. What emerges instead is a volatile mixture of traditional machismo, financial pressures and Barreda’s growing sense of exclusion from the family unit. The conflict between Ricardo and the women in his home is real, but it stems less from their alleged abuse of him than from their understandable rejection of a man whose cruelty made him impossible to live with. It’s true that nobody wanted to be around him—but not to humiliate him. They simply found him deeply unpleasant, even repellent.

Mercedes Morán, Carla Peterson, Maite Lanata and Margarita Páez play, respectively, Barreda’s mother-in-law Elena Arreche, his wife Gladys McDonald, and his daughters Cecilia and Adriana. Together they create a vivid portrait of four women whose lives revolved around one another, filled with plans—moving house, weddings, graduations, social gatherings—that included Ricardo only peripherally, and often more out of obligation than affection. In early-1990s Argentina, especially within the conservative middle-class circles the Barredas belonged to, divorce was still socially frowned upon and it also carried significant financial consequences. Leaving him simply wasn’t seen as a realistic option.

Barreda has a certain conventional quality, at times resembling a courtroom drama, and that flattens some of its attempt to explore the psychological complexity of an almost incomprehensible crime. But Luis Machín’s restrained, clinical performance—capturing Barreda’s chilling emotional detachment through posture, expression and an almost mechanical composure—elevates the material beyond the familiar rhythms of courtroom procedure, legal maneuvering and predictable dramatic beats.

As with the serial killers who continue to fascinate so many true-crime audiences—and in its own way, that’s exactly what this film is about—the screenplay never fully explains its subject. Instead, the burden of interpretation falls on the viewer. We are left trying to imagine what could possibly have gone through this man’s mind as he murdered his entire family. There is no single, tidy explanation. What the film ultimately suggests is that Barreda was not simply an isolated monster. He emerged from—and was enabled by—a culture that made men like him possible. It doesn’t take much looking to realize that culture hasn’t entirely disappeared.