Sebastián Borensztein adapts Martín Baintrub’s novel about Sergio Dayán, a Buenos Aires father drowning in debt who is counted among the dead of the 1994 AMIA attack and decides not to correct the record.

What if the worst day in a country’s recent history were also, for one man, a way out? That uncomfortable question sits at the centre of Rest in Peace (Descansar en paz), the 2024 Argentine thriller written and directed by Sebastián Borensztein, which premiered at the Málaga Film Festival in March 2024 and reached Netflix worldwide on 27 March of that year. Joaquín Furriel plays Sergio Dayán, a family man in Buenos Aires whose debts have long outgrown any honest plan to pay them back, and whose creditors have stopped asking politely.

A disappearance with a date attached

The premise is pinned to a precise and painful moment. On 18 July 1994, a van loaded with explosives was driven into the building of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires. The attack killed 85 people and injured more than 300, and it remains the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history. In the story, Sergio is caught up in the bombing, survives it and is counted among the dead. Rather than come forward, he lets the mistake stand.

The synopsis Netflix released before the premiere is deliberately spare: a man cornered by debt takes advantage of a unique and unforeseeable circumstance to disappear, and after many years living far from his country under a false identity, a chance discovery tests the temptation to find out how his family’s life has gone on without him. The promotional line put the question more bluntly to the audience: have you never thought about leaving everything behind and starting over?

Sergio’s escape route runs north. He crosses into Paraguay through the Triple Frontier, the border region shared by Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, and builds a new life there under another name. Part of the film was shot in Paraguay, with Asunción’s Mercado 4 among its locations, and the cast includes four Paraguayan actors: Lali González, who plays Ilu, alongside Raúl Daumas, Alicia Guerra and Ariel López Sabino.

A novel by Martín Baintrub

The film is based on a 2018 novel by Martín Baintrub whose full title works almost as a pitch: Descansar en paz: ¿nunca soñaste con dejar todo y empezar de nuevo?, which translates as Rest in Peace: Have You Never Dreamed of Leaving Everything and Starting Over? Baintrub, born in Buenos Aires in 1960, is an unusual novelist. He trained as an architect at the University of Buenos Aires, led the university’s student federation in the 1980s and in 1989 co-founded Persuasión, a political communications agency he still runs.

The screenplay is credited to Borensztein and Marcos Osorio Vidal. Netflix announced the project in March 2023 as part of a slate of Argentine productions, with Furriel, Griselda Siciliani and Gabriel Goity already attached and Borensztein confirmed as director and co-writer.

Borensztein and the year 1994

Sebastián Borensztein, born in Buenos Aires in 1963, is the son of the comedian Tato Bores, and he learned the trade writing and directing his father’s television programmes between 1988 and 1994. He went on to create Tiempo final, the real-time suspense anthology that ran on Telefe from 2000 to 2002, and the horror miniseries El garante in 1997. In cinema his best-known titles are Chinese Take-Away (Un cuento chino, 2011), with Ricardo Darín, and Heroic Losers (La odisea de los giles, 2019), both of which won the Goya for best Ibero-American film. Between them came Kóblic (2016), a thriller set during the military dictatorship, and before them La suerte está echada (2005) and Sin memoria (2010).

Rest in Peace is not his first encounter with the AMIA attack. In 2022 he was one of the directors and writers of Iosi, el espía arrepentido, the Prime Video series created by Daniel Burman about a Federal Police spy infiltrated in Buenos Aires’ Jewish community, whose reports were apparently used in the run-up to the 1992 attack on the Israeli embassy and the 1994 bombing. That series looked at the attack from the side of the investigation and the cover-up. Rest in Peace comes at the same date from a far smaller and stranger angle: one ordinary man who turns a public tragedy into a private exit.

The people around Sergio

Joaquín Furriel arrived at the role with a long run of Argentine and Spanish films behind him, among them El patrón: radiografía de un crimen (2014), Cien años de perdón (2016), El árbol de la sangre (2018), El hijo (2019) and the Netflix police thriller La corazonada (2020). At the 27th Málaga Film Festival his work as Sergio earned him the Silver Biznaga for best actor, shared that year with Luis Zahera for Birds Flying East.

Griselda Siciliani plays Estela, the wife Sergio leaves to mourn him. Siciliani, also a dancer, is best known in Argentina for television, from Patito feo and Los Únicos to Farsantes and Educando a Nina, and more recently for the Netflix comedy series Envidiosa. Gabriel Goity, a veteran of Argentine stage, film and television, plays Hugo Brenner and took Málaga’s Silver Biznaga for best supporting actor. Macarena Suárez and Juan Cottet play Sergio’s children, Florencia and Matías, as adults.

Who made it

The film is a Kenya Films and Benteveo Producciones production. Kenya Films was founded in 2016 by Ricardo Darín, his son Chino Darín and Federico Posternak, and its catalogue already included Borensztein’s Heroic Losers and Santiago Mitre’s Argentina, 1985 (2022), which won the Golden Globe for best non-English language film and was nominated for the Oscar for best international feature. Ricardo Darín, Chino Darín, Posternak and Ezequiel Crupnicoff are credited as producers.

Behind the camera, the cinematography is by Rodrigo Pulpeiro and the editing by Alejandro Carrillo Penovi. The score is by Federico Jusid, an Argentine composer who works between Madrid and Los Angeles and has written music for more than 60 feature films and over 70 television series. Daniel Gimelberg handled art direction and Mónica Toschi the costumes. Principal photography began on 25 March 2023 in Argentina, moved to Paraguay and wrapped on 28 May, after nine weeks. The finished film runs 105 minutes.

From Málaga to Netflix

Rest in Peace went to a festival before it went to streaming. It had its world premiere in the official section of the Málaga Film Festival on 7 March 2024, opened in a limited number of Argentine cinemas on 21 March and arrived on the platform worldwide six days later, on 27 March, as part of what Netflix described as its continuing bet on films and series made in Argentina.

An old story with a new trigger

The man who lets the world believe he is dead is one of fiction’s oldest escape fantasies. Luigi Pirandello built The Late Mattia Pascal (1904) around a man wrongly declared dead who seizes the chance to become someone else, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story Wakefield (1835) followed a husband who walks out on his wife and watches her life from a few streets away for twenty years. In cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) had Jack Nicholson take over a dead man’s identity.

What sets Rest in Peace apart from that lineage is the trigger. Sergio does not stage an accident or borrow a stranger’s passport; his new life depends on a real massacre and on the grief of everyone who believes he died in it, his own family included. For an Argentine audience the date carries decades of unanswered questions, and the story places a fictional debtor inside it.

The other half of the premise is the pull back. The synopsis promises that the years in Paraguay do not settle anything, and that the question of what became of Estela, Florencia and Matías turns into an obsession. That is where the thriller lives, in the distance between a man who has buried his old name and a family that buried it for him.

Viewers who know Borensztein through the warmth of Chinese Take-Away or the comic heist of Heroic Losers will find a much darker register here, closer to Kóblic and to his television suspense work. Whether the film earns the weight of the date it borrows is the question each viewer will answer differently. The premise alone, a man hiding inside one of Argentina’s deepest wounds, makes it one of the more unsettling ideas in Netflix’s Argentine catalogue.