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.
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. It’s also because of their manner. Ema tends not to encounter too many quiet, dignified, expected deaths, and those who have experienced a violent end are almost childlike in their confusion and disorientation. Often they seem trapped in a cycle, doomed to re-live (and re-die) their last moments, powerless to change the outcome.
Ema is sick of the dead and long past sick of trying to convince others that her abilities are real. So mostly she ignores the ghosts and they ignore her and that’s fine. But then her estranged sister Lidia (Alejandra Flechner) and her husband fly in for a visit from their home in Seattle, bringing with them their troubled, morbidly obese teenage daughter Julia (Carolina Álvarez), and Ema comes to realize that Julia can also commune with the dead.
And really commune: Julia, miserable and stigmatized and about to be committed to an institution by her hapless parents, loudly and lustily enjoys getting busy with the no-longer-with-us in a way that one supposes cannot technically be necrophilia, considering it’s sex with the spirits of the dead rather than with their bodies. Which doesn’t mean Larraín averts our gaze from these strangely moving copulations; the film is about the non-corporeal but it’s fascinated too by the flesh, by its gratification, its mortification and then, in an increasingly ethereal refrain, its slow putrefaction and decomposition.
With its octagonal clusters of flats arranged around a central water tower that looks like a fist raised against the sky, the neighborhood doesn’t have much spirit of community. The residents occasionally gather in a disused rec center but the meetings devolve into rants about immigrants, junkies, thugs and vigilantism. One man suggests mounting the heads of thieves on spikes, a grisly image that Larraín, for once, spares us, as opposed to the bungling burglar falling from a roof and impaling himself crunchily on a railing, or the three pretty, giggling teens who get shot and shot and shot again in a gang-related hit, or the young woman who dies agonisingly of an infected dog bite she concealed because she couldn’t afford to miss work.
Ema cannot fix these restless ghosts, but sometimes she can distract them from the shock of their painful passing, a talent which puts her in demand when the water supply becomes mysteriously contaminated, and suddenly the whole of Piedrabuena can hear what she has always heard. The screams, the gunshots and the cries for help that went unanswered.
In other hands, this would set up a supernatural TV procedural. But Ema does not solve mysteries or bring murderers to justice. “My Sad Dead” has no interest in being “Medium” and its provenance as TV — it was conceived as a Netflix miniseries but recut into this 186-minute movie for a San Sebastián competition bow — only proves that cinematic storytelling has little to do with the size of the screen on which you watch it. It is entirely cinematic, every scene loaded with texture and subtext and observational nuance. If there’s a comparison, it may be with Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Dekalog,” also nominally a television project and also one set within a single housing complex. (It feels like we’ve been talking about “Dekalog” a lot recently, given the ongoing project to remake it. Perhaps there’s something in the water.)
But really, the similarity is in mood and effect. Larraín, alongside Anastasia Ayazi and Guillermo Calderón, co-scripts with Mariana Enriquez, whose writings provide the foundational inspiration, and their outstanding screenplay tells a hundred little side-stories in addition to its main narrative. Almost all of them are harsh or gross or scary or sorrowful and yet the experience of “My Sad Dead” is mordantly funny and oddly uplifting. Maybe it’s the weirdness. Maybe it’s the way it makes a waterlogged ribbon of skin detaching from a shin and floating away seem deeply beautiful. Or maybe it’s just a reminder that being sad about death — your own or someone else’s — is simply an upside-down affirmation that you are happy to be alive.
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