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.
Plus IconJessica Kiang
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Courtesy of Fabula, San Sebastián Film Festival 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. “Rage weighs more than concrete,” sings Shakira over the closing credits, but the Piedrabuena neighborhood of Buenos Aires is heavy with both.
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