“The human being is a religious animal because he is a desperate animal.”
— Emil Cioran
La Mesías is not simply a series about religious fanaticism. It is a disturbing and hypnotic journey into the dark matter of dependency, identity, and the family as a totalitarian and perverse institution. Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo orchestrate a layered narrative, where trauma is not just a private inheritance, but a collective, systemic structure—an existential condition in which all characters are trapped.
This is a series that moves like a reversed biblical parable, where returning home does not coincide with forgiveness, but with the impossibility of escaping a toxic origin.
At the heart of the series lies the childhood trauma of Enric and Irene, raised under the threat of a visionary mother who teaches them religion as a form of hallucinatory survival. When Enric, now an adult and wounded, discovers that his sisters—raised in isolation—have become the stars of a viral Christian pop group directed by their mother, the past detonates into the present. The videos are tutorials for “talking to God,” pop choreographies directed by a mother who wields faith as both a theatrical weapon and an ideological tool. Views become a new form of grace, of mystical and social approval, where the mother’s diseased desire, her need for control, her madness take the form of manipulation.
In one of the most revealing scenes, the mother tells her son he didn’t come to save his sisters, but to save himself. The line is a clean cut between the illusion of mission and the reality of survival. Faith, here, is the ultimate mask of need, of the dependency on meaning. It’s not God calling—but the void. The desperate need for meaning, even if delusional.
At the core of the series lies an ancient paradox: the human being flees from freedom. As Erich Fromm argued in his famous Escape from Freedom, the individual often prefers the safety of submission to the anxiety of choice. The mother—disruptive and unsettling—becomes the symbol of this dynamic: a woman crushed by a history of abuse and humiliation, who reinvents herself as a prophetess to keep from going mad. Faith is her anchor, her drug, her alibi. But what she offers her children is not love—it is dependency, prison, servitude.
Here enters Étienne de La Boétie’s concept of voluntary servitude: human beings prefer obedience because it spares them the weight of responsibility. In La Mesías, all the characters orbit around this choice—they submit to the mother, to God, to memory, to guilt—just to avoid confronting the void. The anguish of having to choose who to be, without any more redemptive narrative, is too much to bear.
“Freedom is not a gift; it is a burden. And many prefer the relief of obedience.”
— Erich Fromm
La Mesías is, therefore, a long meditation on what it means to be in the world. What happens when no stable references remain, except those imposed by the manipulator? The fragilities that generate dependency—emotional, religious, symbolic—are portrayed with surgical precision. The electronic music accompanying the sisters’ videos is a modern tool for promoting faith, but it is also a manipulated cry, a forced performance. The female body becomes both a vehicle of spiritual propaganda and a prison of expression.
The reference to movements like Opus Dei is no accident: the series evokes the ghosts of religious institutions built on guilt. La Mesías shows how freedom, rather than liberating, terrifies. Better to take refuge in obedience, in representation, in the assigned role. The subjugation to Schopenhauer’s Will through Representation is one of the story’s darkest motors.
The authors’ gaze is deeply unsettled and extends even to the use of ayahuasca—taken by one character to “see everything,” as if only the total unveiling of reality could bring clarity. But truth is an abyss. If you don’t see everything, you see nothing—but if you see everything, you might not survive it. The real issue, then, isn’t faith in God, but the dependency on the search for meaning—for a framework, even a pathological one. This is the true human addiction.
The series also touches on the parable of the Prodigal Son but subverts it: the return home brings no peace, only new wounds. Childhood traumas, the series seems to say, cannot be healed. One can only try to transform them, never knowing if that process will be enough to be saved.
The pretext of faith is revealed for what it is: a desperate search for meaning, for structure, for an Other who can make existence coherent. But the real human dependency is not on God, but on the symbolic structure that protects us from chaos. From this perspective, the family is not only a place of care, but the first form of hierarchical organization, of emotional blackmail, of power. Its portrayal in the series is merciless: a sect, an incestuous network, a grotesque replica of social order.
Through masterful use of electronic music, painterly cinematography, and a narrative that becomes a waking nightmare, La Mesías constructs a world where fragilities are not healed, but exploited. Faith does not redeem—it structures delusion. The tutorials for “talking to God” are the modern version of the confessional: a place where the self is exposed to be approved, manipulated, monetized. Views become the new grace: the more they see you, the more you’re worth.
And yet, despite everything, La Mesías does not judge its characters. It does not absolve them, but neither does it condemn. It shows, with compassion, the struggle of being in the world, of inhabiting a body, a past, a name. And it suggests that perhaps, in the end, healing is never complete. One does not emerge unscathed from childhood trauma. One survives, intermittently. One staggers between illusion and escape.
So, what is salvation? Perhaps it’s the courage to lose faith—to break the spell, to tear through the veil of Maya and see the world without the mediation of representation. But this act, which promises freedom, requires a strength few possess. La Mesías shows us how hard it is to silence the mother’s voice—even when that voice is pure poison—and how deeply the human being is willing to sacrifice everything just to avoid being alone in the void.
The family, more than religion, is the true object on trial. It is the origin of the delirium, the subtlest and most inescapable cage. A mother who manipulates in the name of love, a faith that masks madness, a community that tightens in a circle to avoid the vertigo of freedom. La Mesías reminds us that what we often seek to be saved from is not sin, but the very origin from which we come.
“The family is where the self is built—and often, where it is destroyed.”
— Donald W. Winnicott
