Pablo Larraín Unveils ‘My Sad Dead’: A Macabre, Absurdist Masterpiece About Urban Isolation and the Afterlife

Macabre and melancholy yet suffused with a delicious absurdism that somehow doesn’t clog the arteries of its hopeful little heart, Pablo Larraín’s sprawling, peculiar, terrific “My Sad Dead” is about twenty things at once in every given moment. It is a ghost story, obviously, on account of all the ghosts haunting its frames. It is a droll tragicomedy, featuring eccentrically deadpan characters who provide both the stark tragedy and the dry, unexpected jokes. It serves as a nasty piece of body horror and a ferocious satire—in its own way, as scathing a portrait of modern, urban Argentina as any of Larraín’s previous Chilean films have been about his own homeland. And most surprisingly, it functions as a mini-treatise on hostile urban architecture and the psychological toll it takes on the human spirit to dwell in brutal, brutalist structures that effectively quarantine their inhabitants from society, and from each other. “Rage weighs more than concrete,” sings Shakira over the closing credits, but the Piedrabuena neighborhood of Buenos Aires is undeniably heavy with both.

Ema, brought to life by Mercedes Morán in a fantastic performance defined by dry eyes and an even drier wit, stands almost as an emblem of Piedrabuena itself, though her personal rage has long since transformed into a resilient kind of resignation, tempered only by the quick flashes of amusement that routinely spark up in her otherwise world-weary expression. Or perhaps the word should be otherworld-weary? Ema does not sleep much these days, largely due to the constant cacophony of screaming ghosts who, for the time being at least, only she can hear.

A medical doctor who has been unceremoniously pushed into early retirement amid dark mutterings regarding a controversial trolley-problem decision she was forced to make concerning COVID-19 treatments, Ema does not technically live in Piedrabuena anymore. She maintains a spacious apartment in a much nicer part of the city that she is currently looking to rent out. However, she has recently moved back to the area temporarily to care for her aged mother through the terminal and painful stages of an exhausting illness.

This complex family dynamic is how audiences first encounter her: viewed from above, hovering like a silent angel or an overhead lamp in the dusty attic room of her mother’s house situated right beside the monolithic Piedrabuena housing projects. Ema holds the bedridden woman’s frail, pale blue hand as she passes away—not particularly quietly, nor entirely peacefully. Then, moments after death claims her, the corpse’s eyes pop open.

It is not entirely her, exactly, but rather a fuzzy, not-quite-opaque facsimile of her. The visual effect that “My Sad Dead” employs to summon these lingering spirits is all the more convincing precisely because it avoids being overly flashy. The unusual, low-contrast color palette that Larraín and his ace regular director of photography Sergio Armstrong have chosen blanches the images down to a flat, pinkish gray. Consequently, both the living and those without heartbeats share the exact same pallor of a dreary mortuary waiting room’s magnolia walls.

Yet, viewers always instantly know who is alive and who is, strictly speaking, post-alive. This distinction is maintained not solely because the dead often bear a gruesome tell—such as staggering around with half their head blown off or bleeding copiously from a ragged, ripped-open chest wound—but also because of their distinct behavioral mannerisms. Ema tends not to encounter many quiet, dignified, or expected passings, and those who have suffered a violent end frequently present as almost childlike in their profound confusion and disorientation. Often, they seem utterly trapped in a cruel psychological cycle, doomed to endlessly re-live and re-die their final, agonizing moments while remaining completely powerless to alter the tragic outcome.

Ema is profoundly sick of the dead, having long since moved past the point of trying to convince skeptical outsiders that her supernatural abilities are real. As a result, she mostly chooses to ignore the ghosts wandering her periphery, and they largely ignore her in return—an arrangement that suits her fine.

The delicate status quo shatters, however, when her estranged sister Lidia, portrayed by Alejandra Flechner, and Lidia’s husband fly in for a visit from their home in Seattle. They bring along their troubled, morbidly obese teenage daughter Julia, played by Carolina Álvarez. It is during this tense family reunion that Ema comes to the startling realization that young Julia can also commune with the spirits of the dead.

And she does not merely commune with them; Julia—miserable, heavily stigmatized by her peers, and teetering on the edge of being committed to an institution by her hapless parents—loudly and lustily enjoys getting physical with the no-longer-with-us. It is an interaction that one supposes cannot technically be classified as necrophilia, considering it involves intimacy with the discarnate spirits of the dead rather than their physical corpses.

This bizarre narrative twist does not mean Larraín ever averts the camera’s gaze from these strangely moving copulations. The film remains deeply preoccupied with the non-corporeal realm, yet it is simultaneously fascinated by the physical flesh: by its earthly gratification, its harsh mortification, and ultimately, in an increasingly ethereal refrain, its slow putrefaction and decomposition.

Characterized by its distinctive octagonal clusters of flats arranged in formations that encircle a central water tower resembling a fist raised defiantly against the sky, the Piedrabuena neighborhood rarely fosters a true sense of community. The local residents occasionally gather together in a disused recreation center, but these community meetings invariably devolve into angry rants directed against immigrants, drug users, petty thugs, and the urgent need for violent vigilantism.

During one such gathering, a local man casually suggests mounting the heads of neighborhood thieves on spikes—a grisly image that Larraín, for once, chooses to spare the audience. This stands in stark contrast to the unflinching brutality displayed elsewhere in the film, such as a bungling burglar falling from a roof and impaling himself crunchily on a metal railing, three pretty, giggling teenagers getting repeatedly shot in a gang-related drive-by hit, or a young woman who dies an agonizing death from an infected dog bite she deliberately concealed because she simply could not afford to miss a single day of work.

Ema knows she cannot fix these restless ghosts, but she occasionally possesses the uncanny ability to distract them from the raw, initial shock of their painful passings. This unique talent suddenly places her in high demand across the neighborhood when the local water supply becomes mysteriously contaminated, and the entire population of Piedrabuena is abruptly granted the ability to hear the very same sounds Ema has endured for years: the endless screams, the sharp gunshots, and the desperate cries for help that originally went unanswered.

In less ambitious hands, this premise would easily form the foundation of a standard supernatural television procedural. Yet Ema does not solve ancient mysteries or bring shadowy murderers to swift justice. “My Sad Dead” harbors zero interest in being a cinematic equivalent to television shows like “Medium.” Its unusual provenance as a television-scale project—having been originally conceived as a Netflix miniseries before being thoroughly recut into an epic 186-minute feature film for a competition bow at San Sebastián—only proves that true cinematic storytelling has remarkably little to do with the physical size of the screen upon which a story is consumed.

Every single scene is utterly cinematic, densely loaded with tangible texture, subtext, and observational nuance. If any direct artistic comparison is to be made, it might rightfully be drawn to Krzysztof Kieślowski’s monumental “Dekalog,” which was also nominally a television project and similarly confined to the claustrophobic setting of a single housing complex.

Yet, the true similarity lies primarily in the shared mood and haunting emotional effect. Larraín co-writes the screenplay alongside Anastasia Ayazi and Guillermo Calderón, working directly from the foundational inspirations provided by Mariana Enriquez’s writings. Their outstanding script weaves together a hundred little side-stories alongside its sprawling main narrative.

Almost all of these vignettes are harsh, gross, scary, or profoundly sorrowful, and yet the overall experience of watching “My Sad Dead” remains mordantly funny and strangely uplifting. Perhaps this tonal magic stems from the sheer strangeness of the proceedings, or perhaps it lies in the way the film manages to make a waterlogged ribbon of human skin detaching from a shin and floating away look deeply, strangely beautiful. Ultimately, it functions as a poignant reminder that feeling profound sadness about death—whether your own or someone else’s—is merely an upside-down affirmation of how deeply happy you are to be alive.