‘My Sad Dead’ Netflix Review: Pablo Larraín and Mariana Enríquez Find Common Ground in Death, Class, and the Macabre

Ema talks to the dead. She listens to them complain, she consoles them so they can finally move on — and, let’s be honest, she’s more than a little sick of it. She’s been living in this strange world since she was a girl, since she first realized she had these odd «powers.» For her, the dead are simply there, like the living, just a bit more translucent, and she’s long since made her peace with that particular form of cohabitation. She seems equally at peace with a much harsher reality: the house of Ema’s recently deceased mother, where she’s gone to live (accompanied, naturally, by her mother’s ghost), sits directly across from a public housing complex in Buenos Aires — the Piedrabuena neighborhood, in Villa Lugano — where dense, dangerous things happen every single day. Unlike most of her neighbors, who’ve taken up arms and are calling for a crackdown, Ema has learned to live alongside all of it. Good, bad, rich, poor, living, dead: in her head, everyone stands on equal footing.

Ema (Mercedes Morán) is past sixty, has just been more or less forced into retirement from the public hospital where she worked, and has decided to sell her house in a «safer» neighborhood to move into her mother’s —a spacious old chalet, but in a considerably less genteel part of town. There she cohabits with her mother’s ghost (played by Chilean actress Luz Jiménez), who hasn’t stopped complaining even in death. But her daily life is about to get a lot more complicated. First comes her daughter (Dolores Fonzi), a photographer and filmmaker with whom she has a fairly tense relationship. Then comes the unexpected, extended visit from her sister (Alejandra Flechner), her brother-in-law (Carlos Portaluppi), and her niece (Carolina Alvarez), who’ve flown in from the United States —Oregon, specifically— to stay a while.

The relatives’ visit —sprinkling an English word into every other sentence, to comic and quite effective effect— has one clear purpose: getting their daughter Julie treated at a public hospital. The girl has an affliction similar to her aunt’s, but one that manifests very differently —she has sex with ghosts, and enjoys it rather loudly. Somewhere between apathetic and anguished about the hand she’s been dealt with her parents, Julie finds a degree of understanding in her aunt, though that doesn’t stop her parents from pushing ahead with their plan to have her committed to the Moyano psychiatric hospital. Until, one day, Julie runs away, and nobody —well, nobody except the audience— has any idea where she’s gone. Ema is left to deal with that problem on top of heavy, unresolved matters from her own past, an uneasy relationship with her daughter, and the murders of three girls from the Piedrabuena neighborhood that only intensify her already overwhelming contact with the world of the dead.

Directed by Pablo Larraín and based on the short story of the same name by Mariana Enríquez, My Sad Dead actually does with Enríquez’s work something very similar to what Laura Casabé did in The Virgin of the Quarry Lake: it folds in elements from several of the author’s other stories —»Julie,» «A Sunny Place for Shady People,» and, to a lesser extent, «When We Talked to the Dead«— combining them, and in some cases lifting them entirely out of their original literary context. This small Frankenstein’s monster of a project is split into four chapters in the version Netflix will release, though it was lightly re-edited for its theatrical premiere in San Sebastián. Either way, given the nature and narrative logic of its various subplots, the material clearly finds its best form as a series.

My Sad Dead comes across as a genuinely fitting pairing of two fairly similar sensibilities, since both Larraín and Enríquez tend to view the world as a mix of social realism and something closer to the macabre, the murky, the outright terrifying. The Chilean director’s filmography, from Post Mortem through El Conde, has never just flirted with the gray zone between life and death —it tends to live there, wrapped in a distinctly funereal atmosphere. And the Argentine author’s fiction dives headfirst into those same depths. Both artists, too, have always grounded their stories in very specific places, eras, and circumstances: the Chilean and Argentine military dictatorships, class divides, the quiet, grinding struggle between those who have a little more and those who have a little less. In the series, their respective preoccupations cross over naturally, which becomes obvious in how seamlessly they collaborate on the script.

Within its episodic structure, My Sad Dead finds its center of gravity in Ema’s experience. Morán plays her with an eloquent blend of bluntness and exhaustion —someone thoroughly worn down by everything around her, especially the living, who never stop disappointing her. The way she deals with her neighbors at community meetings (mostly consumed by talk of «security»), the way she can’t stand her sister, even the somewhat ambiguous way she relates to her own daughter —it all points to a character stretched to her absolute limit. She’s not noticeably more patient with the dead, either, and often wants nothing more than to get rid of them —but with them, at least, she connects a little more, through shared pain. Or perhaps because she herself feels a bit like a ghost in her own life.

The sprawling housing blocks and enormous water tank of Piedrabuena give the series that rough, photographically uncomfortable texture so common to Larraín’s work. Unlike the glossy, formally polished look of most Netflix series and films, My Sad Dead is unmistakably an auteur piece. It’s built out of long, sinuous takes, with cinematography so stripped-down it almost looks like it’s missing color correction entirely (the kind of thing Instagram filters would normally smooth over), set in locations that feel closer to Argentina’s New Cinema movement of the 2000s than to anything the Chilean director has made before. Enríquez’s fiction often starts from that same mix of local gangs, reactionary neighbors, cumbia, and urban violence, layering in the macabre, fantastical, dark elements that define her work. Larraín feels genuinely at home in these settings — he makes them his own without ever betraying their essence.

Though narratively uneven and occasionally erratic in some of its dramatic turns, My Sad Dead succeeds in portraying a world where life and death coexist permanently — a kind of spectral limbo where the souls of those who died traumatic deaths mingle with the living who carry around similar experiences of their own. More than a horror story, this is a macabre tale about what happens when social, political, and economic conditions push people to the very edge of what they can bear, many of them losing their grip on reality somewhere in the middle of their anguish or desperation. An explosive breeding ground that, like some foreign body dropped into a supposedly clean water tank, ends up contaminating everything.