My Sad Dead Review: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
My Sad Dead is a genuinely strange, unforgettable miniseries that turns grief and death into something eerie and grounded at once, anchored by Mercedes Moran’s excellent performance and Pablo Larrain’s fearless direction.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Platform: Netflix
Genre: Psychological Horror
Episodes: 4
Director: Pablo Larrain
Cast: Mercedes Moran, Dolores Fonzi, Alejandra Flechner
The rarest compliment you can give a miniseries these days is that it genuinely does not resemble anything else out there, and Pablo Larrain’s My Sad Dead absolutely earns that distinction. Being able to talk to the dead might sound like a superpower on paper, but nearly every story that explores this idea, including this Netflix miniseries, treats it as a curse rather than a gift, and honestly, it is easy to see why.
The series follows Ema, played by Mercedes Moran, a woman in her sixties who has spent years seeing ghosts and has grown numb to the experience by now. Recently forced into retirement from the public hospital where she worked, Ema moves into the home of her recently deceased mother, whose ghost still lingers within its walls.
The house sits directly across from a troubled social housing neighborhood where violence and tragedy have become disturbingly routine, yet Ema can barely muster the energy to be bothered by the constant sounds of gunshots and screams outside her window. When death no longer feels final, there is not much reason left to fear it.
Ema’s isolation becomes especially clear once her family unexpectedly arrives, temporarily filling her quiet home with chaos. Her daughter Carolina thinks she has simply lost the plot, her sister Lidia assumes she is suffering from unresolved childhood trauma, and Lidia’s self-important husband Tomas provides some genuinely funny moments purely through how much contempt the show clearly holds for him.
Their daughter Julie, meanwhile, shares Ema’s ability to see the dead, though hers manifests in a far more chaotic, unsettling way, treating her connection to ghosts as an excuse for wild, noisy encounters that immediately signal just how strange this story is willing to get.
The family has actually flown in from Oregon specifically to admit Julie into a psychiatric facility, technically for her own good, though clearly more for their own convenience. Ema starts to see something of a kindred spirit in Julie, but by the end of the very first episode, Julie has already been institutionalized and facilitated an improbable escape, setting off a grim chain of consequences that Ema alone is left to untangle.
Based on the short story of the same name by Mariana Enriquez, My Sad Dead pulls together a mix of existing ideas and stitches them into four genuinely bizarre, atmospheric hours. The overall effect feels both oddly grounded and strangely alien at once, like a slightly warped reflection of reality.
The show’s muted, grey color palette blurs the line between the living and the dead so effectively that the deceased sometimes become almost indistinguishable from everyone else, their quiet wailing simply blending into the background like ambient noise.
The underlying idea, that Ema is essentially already a ghost herself despite being alive, quietly haunting her own existence, is not subtle, but Larrain hides plenty of his more unsettling ideas within strikingly mundane imagery. You may genuinely never look at a water tower or a housing complex the same way again after watching this.
What makes the series feel so distinct is its complete lack of the polish typically associated with big-budget streaming releases. It has an almost handheld, intentionally rough visual texture, with unconventional aspect ratios and washed-out colors that make it feel like it barely snuck past any studio notes. That rawness works entirely in the show’s favor here, giving Larrain’s trademark strangeness room to stay fully intact rather than getting smoothed over.
Fair warning though, My Sad Dead is unapologetically weird, and that weirdness can feel alienating if you go in expecting something more conventional. Go in curious and open-minded instead, and you will find a genuinely haunting, unforgettable piece of television.
If character-driven dramas with real emotional weight are more your speed afterward, our review of Habeas Corpus is worth checking out too.