‘Cathedrals’ Prime Video Review: Two Timelines, One Dead Girl, And A Family Built On Silence

In an rather curious coincidence of timing, two streaming platforms are premiering adaptations of novels by prominent Argentine authors: Mariana Enríquez and Claudia Piñeiro. Both projects blend Argentine and Chilean directors, casts, and screenwriters in ways that feel remarkably organic. Enríquez’s contribution is My Sad Dead, which Chilean director Pablo Larraín made for Netflix and which premieres next week. Piñeiro’s is Cathedrals, whose episodes were split between Chilean director Pepa San Martín and Argentine director Fabiana Tiscornia. Perhaps the biggest difference between the two is that the Enríquez-based story stays in Buenos Aires with a mostly Argentine cast, while the Piñeiro adaptation relocates to Chile with an essentially Chilean ensemble.

Still, the series stays fairly faithful to the source material, revisiting the terrain Piñeiro has made her own: worlds where religion seeps into family life, tearing households apart and pitting relatives against one another. The story unfolds across two timelines — 1986, when an unsolved murder took place, and 2018, when the case is finally reopened in search of the guilty parties. The two eras constantly intercut, centered on the shocking death of Ana Sardá (Octavia Bernasconi), a 17-year-old girl found dead under suspicious circumstances.

Despite the severity of the case, her devoutly religious family (Paulina García and Alfredo Castro play her parents, Dolores and Adolfo Sardá) chooses silence over investigation — a decision that starts to fracture the household, setting her two surviving daughters against each other: the older, deeply religious Carmen (played by Paula Luchsinger as a young woman and Amparo Noguera 32 years later), and the younger, rebellious Lía (Vivianne Diez, later Ignacia Baeza), who is enraged by her family’s wish to bury the whole affair and leaves the country to settle in Spain.

By 2018, Lía is back in Chile to be with her now-widowed father, whose health is failing. Honoring Adolfo’s wish to finally dig into the case properly, she starts digging through details and information about what really happened to her sister all those years ago: who killed her, and why? And, above all, why did no one ever investigate? What she uncovers opens doors onto a whole world of secrets and lies, many of them bound up with religious pressure and everything that comes with it.

Structured as a whodunit, Cathedrals keeps its focus squarely on who killed Ana, with several viable suspects in play — any of whom, if their secrets came out, would scandalize the society the Sardás inhabit. The screenplay, by Fredjkes and Quesada —both television veterans— moves fluidly between timelines, weaving in flashbacks that trace young Ana’s life and the trouble she gets into by not fully «respecting» the demands of her family and her religious upbringing.

Effective if simplistic, and anchored by a strong ensemble cast working with dialogue that could use a bit more spark, Cathedrals revisits territory already explored in other Piñeiro adaptations, like The Kingdom — delivering a pointed critique of the Church and of devout families who’d rather sweep their «sins» under the rug than face outside judgment and scrutiny. In its intergenerational back-and-forth, the series stages a clash between the more feminist, anti-patriarchal outlook of 2018 and the far more conservative one that dominated the 1980s — and which, in more ways than one, still lingers today.

The series is effective if conventional, its narrative arc rarely straying from what’s more or less telegraphed as soon as the main characters and conflicts are laid out. Cathedrals doesn’t overstay its welcome —six episodes are all it needs— and works best when it leans into the personal feelings and lived experience of these three sisters’ fraught adolescence. A carefully rendered period setting and a cast of recognizable names —including Argentines Muriel Santa Ana and Carolina Kopelioff, who play the adult and teenage versions of Ana’s best friend— add up to a solid, competent series. No more, no less.