A doctor who can see the dead becomes the reluctant guardian to a Buenos Aires neighborhood plagued by violence in a dolorous but darkly witty grotesque based on Mariana Enriquez's short stories. Macabre and melancholy but 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 20 things at once in every moment. It’s a ghost story, obviously, on account of all the ghosts.
It’s a droll tragicomedy, with eccentrically deadpan characters providing both the tragedy and the jokes. It’s a nasty body-horror and a ferocious satire — in its way as scathing a portrait of modern, urban Argentina as any of Larraín’s previous Chilean films have been about his homeland. And most surprisingly, it’s a mini-treatise on hostile urban architecture and the effect it has on the human spirit to dwell in brutal, brutalist structures that quarantine their inhabitants from society, and from each other.
Ema (Mercedes Morán, in a fantastic performance of dry eyes and drier wit) is almost an emblem of Piedrabuena, though her rage has long since turned to a resilient kind of resignation, only tempered by the quick flash of amusement that often sparks up in her otherwise world-weary expression. Or should that be otherworld-weary? Ema doesn’t sleep much because of all the screaming ghosts who, for now, only she can hear.
A doctor who has been pushed into retirement, with dark mutterings going on about a trolley-problem decision she made regarding COVID treatments, Ema doesn’t technically live in Piedrabuena anymore — she has a spacious apartment in a nicer part of the city that she is looking to rent out. But she has recently moved back to care for her aged mother through the terminal stages of a painful illness. And that’s how we first see her, from above, as we hover like an angel or an overhead lamp, in the attic room of her mother’s house beside the Piedrabuena projects.
Ema holds the bedridden woman’s frail, pale blue hand as, not particularly quietly nor entirely peacefully, she dies. Then her corpse opens its eyes. It’s not her, exactly, but a fuzzy, not-quite-opaque facsimile of her.
The effect that “My Sad Dead” uses to summon the dead is the more convincing for not being particularly flashy. The unusual, low-contrast color palette that Larraín and his ace regular DP Sergio Armstrong have chosen blanches the images to a flat, pinkish gray, so that those with and without heartbeats all have the pallor of a mortuary waiting room’s magnolia walls. Yet we always know who is alive and who is, well, post-alive, and not just because the dead often have a tell, like they’ll be staggering around with half their head blown off, or bleeding copiously from a ragged, ripped-open chest wound.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
