E.1027 – EILEEN GRAY AND THE HOUSE BY THE SEA
Beatrice Minger E Christoph Schaub
Biography • 2024 • 1h 29m
Synopsis
Emma is a woman of around sixty, a former doctor, recently forced into early retirement against her will. She lives in Argentina and has the ability to see and speak with the dead. When her mother dies, the boundary between the world of the living and that of the dead becomes even more unstable. The arrival of her granddaughter Julie further alters the balance. She too seems to have a particular relationship with the dead, while in the Piedrabuena neighborhood, a poor and violent suburb of Buenos Aires, disturbing events begin to multiply: disappearances, murders, bodies, contaminated water, the dead returning, and the living who already seem to belong to an intermediate territory. What initially concerns Emma and her family thus ends up transforming into a collective phenomenon.
What might appear to be a gift progressively becomes a disturbing condition: the dead are not simply supernatural presences, but carry with them what the living have tried to repress. The past returns, literally, and with it responsibilities, guilt, violence, and the things that a society prefers not to see.
Review
9 min read
Reviewed by Beatrice
· 01. October 2026
Death is what life has so far invented that is most solid.
— Emil Cioran
— Emil Cioran
In Mis muertos tristes, the return of the dead can be read precisely in this direction. Not as a simple horror device, but as the return of what has been repressed. When we bury the dead, in fact, we do not bury only their bodies: we can also bury a part of the past that we no longer want to see, what we have done to others, what we have produced in the world and what we prefer to forget so that we can continue living as if nothing had happened.
The dead, then, do not return to frighten.
They return to prevent oblivion.
They return to prevent oblivion.
And this is where the series becomes profoundly political.
Emma and Julie are characters who seem to have a different relationship with reality precisely because they have lost, or perhaps never fully possessed, that capacity for repression that allows the living to adapt to their own lies. Julie says it in an apparently absurd sentence: “I am already dead.” It is a sentence that can be read as the declaration of someone who no longer needs to tell herself stories. Julie does not have to convince herself that she is something she is not. She does not have to protect herself through fiction.
Emma, too, looks at what others prefer not to see.
When Julie says that in the United States there are people who live in cars because they cannot afford to pay rent, the series stages a precise distance between what is officially narrated and the way people actually live. It is one of the most interesting political mechanisms in the series: reality exists even when the dominant narrative decides to erase it.
Emma thus becomes a kind of conscience moving through the city. She sees the lack of solidarity, empathy, humanity; she sees what others choose not to see.
It is a dynamic that recalls, in certain respects, La zona by Rodrigo Plá: a community can reach the point of pretending not to see a human being die, even when it is a child, in order to protect its territory, its security, its well-being. Emma makes the opposite movement. She looks. And precisely because she looks and sees, she can no longer pretend.
The discourse becomes even more explicit when Julie and Emma talk about hatred. Julie observes that there is a great deal of hatred in the United States, and that the same happens in Argentina. Emma replies that it begins with hatred and ends with fascism.
It is not an ornamental sentence. Within Larraín’s universe, after all, the relationship between memory, violence and politics is certainly not accidental, as in Tony Manero, Post Mortem, No, The Club. The dead person who returns becomes the fantastic form of a history that refuses to be archived, as in his film El Conde.
But the series does not limit itself to political memory. Its most interesting dimension is perhaps precisely the one in which the supernatural becomes material.
The cistern scene is exemplary. Emma tries to report that the water is contaminated. The cistern supplies poor neighborhoods, while the wealthy ones have access to clean water. No one wants to listen to her. Emma has to go personally to get someone to receive her and, in order to be taken seriously, she tells them what she did during Covid and not only that: as a doctor, she had to take oxygen away from people who were dying in order to give it to patients who could still be saved.
Julie’s body in the cistern thus transforms contamination into something much greater than a simple fantastic element. What has been repressed returns inside the structures of society and ends up contaminating everyday life.
And yet it is precisely here that one of the most interesting — and most debatable — contradictions of the series emerges.
Mis muertos tristes is a story strongly built around women. A grandmother, a mother, a daughter. Women who move through pain, death, power, the body, memory. Emma utters a sentence that contains a radical affirmation of autonomy: a man cannot make her do something; she is the one who decides what she must do.
But if the discourse also wants to be a discourse about female emancipation, it becomes inevitable to question the language through which this emancipation is represented.
Why, then, continue to use words such as “slut,” “whore,” as insults directed at women? It is not simply a matter of determining whether a word is vulgar or elegant. The problem is deeper: language is not neutral. It has an ontological value. It constructs, consolidates and reproduces a particular idea of reality.
The scene in which Emma, after unsuccessfully attempting to report the problem of contaminated water, is forced to confront yet another bureaucratic indifference and concludes with “your mother, that fucking whore” is emblematic precisely for this reason. The line may be realistic, it may belong to the character’s anger, it may even be consistent with the register of the scene. But it remains a cultural contradiction: a series that constructs such a clear discourse on female autonomy continues to make use of a vocabulary that, historically, has had the sexual degradation of women as one of its most powerful instruments.
It is not a question of moral censorship. It is a political question of language.
And here the series could have been much more coherent.
Another formal choice, however, is decidedly more effective: sound. The music, often built around the piano and a repetitive, disturbing, almost obsessive sound, is crossed by moans, groans, screams and gunshots. It is a very prominent, at times even insistent, component that constructs a world in which the disturbing does not come only from the images but continually invades perception.
But it is precisely on the formal level that another problem emerges.
The Italian dubbing is frankly terrible. Artificial, ridiculous, loaded with sighs and constant emphases, it often seems to add intentions where the images and the original performances might already be enough. And in a series that works precisely through restraint, ambiguity and unease, this vocal superstructure ends up disturbing what should be disturbing.
It is a particularly serious shame because the voice is part of the political and social construction of a work. Dubbing is not a technical detail when it alters the rhythm, tone and credibility of the characters. Here it risks transforming complex material into something much more explicit and conventional.
And it is precisely this explicitness that leads to the series’ more general question: how much Larraín has had to modify his own cinema in order to enter the logic of the serial and mainstream product.
In his films, meaning often emerges through subtraction. The viewer must move through the images, fill in the gaps, endure ambiguity. In Mis muertos tristes, instead, many interpretations seem to arrive already packaged: the symbol is explained, the meaning is emphasized, the metaphor is accompanied.
It is almost an interpretation through addition, whereas Larraín’s cinema is often constructed through interpretation by subtraction.
And this difference is important precisely because the series is a Netflix product: the risk is that a work born from literary and cinematic material so unsettling is progressively made more readable, more accessible, more recognizable, more consumable.
Take Me Home, Country Roads, too, at the moment when a body is found in the cistern, can be read in this light. A song that evokes returning home, to an original, almost pure place, collides with what that body represents. Returning home is no longer a return to an uncontaminated origin. The America evoked by the song as a place of belonging and welcome is also the place of exclusion, precarity and contamination.
Julie, too, is a figure of expulsion: she belongs to a world that has not truly welcomed her and that, through her, returns what it had tried to expel.
Larraín films deformed bodies, faces, wounds, corpses, degraded spaces with undeniable visual precision. The desaturated cinematography of Sergio Armstrong constructs a world almost deprived of color, suspended between reality and hallucination. It is a choice consistent with the director’s cinema and with Enriquez’s universe.
One of the most significant concerns pain.
Grandmother, mother, daughter and granddaughter are all allergic to morphine.
It is an apparently absurd, almost grotesque detail, but precisely for that reason extremely Larraínian. Morphine is the drug that anesthetizes pain, that makes it possible to endure it by temporarily removing it from consciousness. Four generations of women who cannot take it thus become the figure of a genealogy in which pain cannot be anesthetized.
It cannot be erased. It cannot be put to sleep. It cannot be transformed into a simple event of the past.
Pain passes from one generation to another like a substance for which there is no antidote.
And this is perhaps the true family inheritance of the series: not wealth, not blood, not a name, but what has not been worked through.
The family thus becomes the first place in which death returns.
Emma sees her mother because her relationship with her mother has not simply ended with death. Carolina confronts a mother she cannot truly reach. Julie represents a generation even more radically expelled from the mechanisms of social protection. Three generations of women seem to occupy different spaces within the same trauma: old age, motherhood, youth. And in the middle of it all is the female body, continually subjected to the necessity of enduring, caring, surviving.
The body, however, is never merely individual.
The contaminated water is perhaps the most evident metaphor for this idea: what is poisoned at the source inevitably passes through everyone. Evil does not remain confined to the individual because there are material conditions that produce and distribute it. The neighborhood thus becomes a diseased organism in which physical and social contamination ultimately coincide.
In the end, Mis muertos tristes remains more interesting when it does not try to explain too much of what it stages. Its dead work because they are not simply dead: they are what returns when a society thinks it has solved a problem by burying it.
The ghost is responsibility returning.
Contamination is what passes from one body to another, from one generation to another, from a private history to society.
And death, once again, is not the end of the story. It is the moment when what had been repressed begins to speak again.
It is in the nature of pain to have no shame about repeating itself.
— Emil Cioran
— Emil Cioran
