Even if you don't believe in them, ghost stories are eerie. They take place on the threshold between our daily world and a mysteriously unknown realm. Now, many movies and books cross this threshold merely to scare the bejeezus out of us. But the greatest ghost stories aim to do something more — such as capturing the weight of Mexico's past like Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, or exploring one's own madness, as Stanley Kubrick does in his adaptation of Stephen King's much saner The Shining.
You find that brand of ambition in My Sad Dead, a new Spanish-language Netflix series centering on a woman who can see and talk to ghosts. Weaving together three short stories by Mariana Enriquez, who's been dubbed "the sorceress of Buenos Aires horror," this four-part show was directed by Pablo Larraín, the Chilean filmmaker who's best known here for movies about Jackie O, starring Natalie Portman, and Lady Di, starring Kristen Stewart. But Larraín's always at his best closer to home, and here he's made a show whose blend of creepiness, melancholy, sarcastic humor and political anger is unlike anything else on TV.
Mercedes Morán stars as Ema, an antisocial 60-ish doctor who has a gift or maybe a curse: She can see and communicate with ghosts. Forced into retirement, she moves into her family's grand old house to live with her dead mother, who's still present and grumbling as a ghost. Now, Ema can't help the dead resolve their problems like Jennifer Love Hewitt did on that old show Ghost Whisperer, but she can calm them by talking to them.
Ema spends her days soothing the dead, swapping barbed words with her photographer daughter — who feels ignored in favor of the dead — and going to community meetings. Life gets trickier when her sister and brother-in-law fly down from the U.S. along with their daughter Julie — that's a terrific Carolina Sánchez Álvarez — whom they intend to stick in a mental institution. Her parents are horrified by her obesity and loud moans during supposed orgies with the dead. But Ema feels a bond with her niece.
And when Julie escapes, it triggers a series of events in which, suddenly, everyone in her neighborhood can now hear the cries of the dead. Which drives them mad. When three joyful young women are gunned down in a gang killing, locals call on Ema to help stop the victims' incessant wailing. She grudgingly does this, but also begins searching for Julie.
Now, both Enriquez and Larraín are fascinated by the liminal space connecting life and death. But they're not interested in telling a conventionally scary horror story. My Sad Dead has no lurid melodrama, no shock cuts. Instead, it uses ghosts to evoke the actual material horrors of today's Latin America, where the powerful wound and ignore the powerless.
This is a hard thing to pull off on-screen, but Larraín does a terrific job of conjuring up Ema's somewhat alternate reality. The cinematography has a slightly bleached-out, old videotape look, which makes the physical world feel a tad transparent, open to the other side. And individual images are often uncanny, from the camera's smooth glide as it follows Ema through Buenos Aires to the overhead shots looking straight down at scenes of death and dying. Is this ghost-cam? Larraín shows how Ema's once-fancy neighborhood is turning into a ghost of its former self, hemmed in by soulless architecture, druggie encampments and housing projects exploding with violence.
With her distant gaze and lank, ash-gray hair, Ema looks like a seer, a somewhat irascible one, whom Morán imbues with riveting charisma. Where Julie loves her close encounters with ghosts — her smile is a wonder — Ema is worn down by decades of helping suffering spirits find momentary peace. This only makes her angrier at her country's rulers for failing to look after all the Argentine people. In those community meetings, she snaps at her middle-class neighbors for despising the poor or letting fear of crime lead them into calls for quasi fascist policing.
I think it's not accidental that Enriquez and Larraín should be drawn to ghost stories with their intrusion of past lives into the present. They grew up in countries where thousands were "disappeared" by military juntas in the '70s and '80s. Both Argentina and Chile are still haunted by their political victims. And you sense this watching My Sad Dead. Ema feels a responsibility to the dead — to hear what they have to tell us — the better to understand our responsibility to the living.
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