My Sad Dead, a 2026 supernatural mini-series shot in Buenos Aires, is an excellent illustration of something that streaming services do very well. A program of this sort, made cheaply but with great panache, allows the director to experiment with material that might not be viable as a feature film. Another example of this sort of mini-series are the three seasons of Paolo Sorrentino's The Young Pope, an extraordinary program that, in terms of its length and sophistication, would not be possible in any other form. Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie's remarkable The Curse, similarly, is an innovative program that probably couldn't have been made except for streaming or cable TV. It's my contention that if Alejandro Innaritu's Digger had been released on cable or streaming, the show would have been greeted with rapturous acclaim and accorded universal plaudits. As it is, the stench of commercial failure around Digger taints the air in the theater and puts both the Mexican master-director and poor Tom Cruise in a bad odor. My Sad Dead, directed and written by the great Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain, is an example of a production that would not be commercially viable in movie theaters despite the show's manifest excellence -- the risk of failure, however, doesn't hover this four-part mini-series, about 200 minutes long, since Netflix has paid for the film and doesn't require an exorbitant box-office to make the venture profitable.
Ema is a capable but disgraced doctor working in a large and chaotic Buenos Aires hospital. She's rumored to have triaged viable COVID patients by diverting resources from the dying to those with a chance of living. (Ema seems harried and has a prickly personality; she is like the great character actress Thelma Ritter from Pickup on Sixth Street. From her earliest childhood, Ema has, to use the parlance of The Sixth Sense, seen dead people. The dead wail and howl and moan in this movie, a sonic backdrop like the unsettling sounds that we hear in The Zone of Interest. Mostly the dead are inconsolable, but Ema, in her own way (as with her COVID patients) tries to help those who can be reached -- she gently guides them to places that they can haunt without being overly intrusive and, in fact, helpful to the living. In the opening scene, we see Ema's elderly mother Susanna dying in agony. It's a family trait that Ema and Susanna and her daughter, Cora, can't tolerate morphine. The horrible pain afflicting Ema's mother has caused her to scream to the point that she has destroyed her vocal cords -- and then, she screams without vocal cords. Death doesn't help much. She still sits around Ema's house morosely, moaning and weeping in a high-pitched, child's voice.
Emas's daughter, Cora, is a photographer. She is involved in filming some kind of a music video (she is taking still shots) in a very bad neighborhood a few blocks from where Ema lives. The neighborhood is what we would call in the States, "the projects" and it's rife with hip hop and crime. Into this milieu comes Tomas and Lila with their enormously fat daughter Julie. Lila is Ema's sister who lives in Portland, Oregon and she's practical, self-absorbed, and doesn't see dead people. Julie, who is huge and bloated, is about 24 and wears a red football jersey with the letter 12 on it, marked "Namath." Julie is miserable and mentally ill. She has been hospitalized many times without any real benefit as to her schizophrenia. Julie is a nuisance because she has noisy sex nightly for hours at a time with apparitions that she calls her "friends". It's not clear whether these apparitions are purely imaginary or, perhaps, the ghosts of the dead, because, like Ema, she can see her "triste muertos" ("the sad dead"). There's a big hexagonal shaped water-tower built above the block of condominiums where Ema lives. After attending a neighborhood meeting of some kind with Julie, Ema mentions something to the obese girl about the water tower. So, in a driving rainstorm, Julie climbs up onto the top of building, hoists herself up a ladder, and, then, hurls her body face-first into the murky reservoir in the tower. Some criminals gun down three pretty girls who are shopping for clothing with money given them by Cora for posing for pictures for her. (In a way, Cora is indirectly responsible for the death of the girls -- in this film, everyone is sort of indirectly responsible for everyone else's misery.) We, then, see the enormous Julie having vigorous sex with three or four apparitions, who may include the girls shot down for the money Cora gave them. (This remarkable sequence occurs before Julie drowns herself in the water tower.)
No one knows where Julie has gone. Ultimately Lila and Tomas return to Portland. Ema wanders the streets, shot in languorous long tracking scenes, looking in a desultory way for Julie. The streets are filled with choruses of howling dead; the sound track quivers with dolorous strings and wailing ghosts. Cora can now see the dead a little bit and she chats with her taciturn dead grandmother. In an alley, she goes to the place where her lover died from a heroin overdose and sits with her head on the ghost's lap. Up in the water tower, Julie is rotting -- skin flakes off her face and feet and fills the reservoir with lacy bits of decomposing flesh. The corpse-juice in the water, apparently, affects anyone who drinks it and slowly more and more people can see ghosts. Ema figures out that Julie is rotting in the water tower, verifies that she is floating there, now sentient as a ghost. Lila and Tomas return to look for Julie. Ema reports that there is a corpse rotting in the communities' water, but this being Buenos Aires, no one really does anything for several weeks. Tomas sings John Denver's song "Country Roads" in the shower. Later, in a bravura tour-de-force, the camera tracks in circles as a crowd of ambulances, fire trucks and emergency workers convene on the water tower to hoist Julies' rotting body out of the reservoir -- these images are scored to John Denver's pop song. (A similar sequence occurs in the fourth episode scored to a perky pop tune by Shakira.) There's no resolution to any of the subplots, many of which I haven't mentioned. Julie reappears as a ghost and continues to have sex with her "friends" whom she thought had abandoned her -- hence, the suicide in the water tower. Susanna, Ema's old mother, seems reconciled to being dead and her pain has lessened -- she now sits placidly at the dinner table with Ema and Cora who has moved in with them. After a particularly vigorous bout of group sex, Julie also sits at the dinner table, smiling shyly and contentedly, as she watches the two living women eat their supper. Larrain provides a shot of elephantine Julie completely nude, facing the camera like some sort of prehistoric fertility goddess. It's unclear whether the final scene at the dinner table is a vision of Hell or a glimpse of some sort of perverse heaven.
The tone of the film is assured, morbid, and elliptical. The picture is shot on overexposed film so that everything is pale, ghostlike, and seems bleached-out. Larrain blurs the faces of the dead so that with their open screaming mouths they look like paintings by Francis Bacon -- particularly the artist's "Screaming Pope (after Velasquez)". In longer shots, the dead are everywhere, sitting half-naked on park benches or staggering down hospital or bureaucratic corridors. The movie has many shots that simply track Ema as she wanders about the mean streets -- there are as many moving shots of this kind as there are images of Jimmy Stewart driving his car in Vertigo, a movie that has some of the same ambience of My Sad Dead. The film has something to do with grief, particularly the grief of those mourning the "disappeared" like Julie. Julie's corpse taints the whole community and, briefly, causes everyone to see horrifying visions and apparitions. But, at the end, things seem to have returned to some sort of macabre normality. This is a remarkable movie, very bold with respect to its slow pace and unattractive, if realistic, bodies and faces. Pablo Larrain is a great filmmaker and, although I don't exactly understand, My Sad Dead, I admire it greatly.
