The Giant Falls on Netflix asks if Boris owes his dying father anything. It doesn’t

Boris has worked for years guiding tourists through one of the largest waterfalls on earth. He knows its measurements, its force, its seasonal variations. He knows how to stand in front of something enormous without being unmade by it. What he has never learned to do is stand in front of his father — and the film built around that inability is the most structurally honest thing The Giant Falls (El último gigante) attempts, even when it loses its nerve about what it has found.

Julián, the father in question, did not leave. That is the specific precision that separates this film from the broad genre it superficially resembles. Julián — played by Oscar Martínez with the composed self-regard of a man who has not yet fully assessed the cost of his decisions — was a former aeronautics pilot who maintained two complete families in two Argentine cities and, at some point, chose the one that was not in Puerto Iguazú. Boris was seven. He was not left in the conventional sense of a parent who disappears. He was evaluated, weighed against an alternative, and found to be the losing option. The adult Boris, played by Matías Mayer with the carefully organized non-feeling of someone whose emotional architecture was interrupted before it was finished, has spent 28 years converting that verdict into a personality.

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When Julián returns — arriving at Leticia’s door, standing outside the life he opted out of with the posture of a man who believes the request he is about to make is reasonable — the film’s central dramatic problem becomes visible. Boris cannot simply be angry. Anger would be clean. What Boris carries is something more specific: 28 years of waiting that he organized into apparent non-waiting, a practiced equanimity that is not peace but the structural management of a wound he has never been permitted to name cleanly. He leads tourists through an immense landscape with charm and professionalism. He lives with his girlfriend Mich. He drinks with his friend Bebe. He does not, visibly, spend his days thinking about his father. And yet the moment Julián appears, everything Boris has constructed reveals itself as contingent on a single absence that has now returned.

Martínez, who in 2016 became the first Latin American actor to receive the Coppa Volpi at Venice — for his work in The Distinguished Citizen, where he played a Nobel Prize-winning writer whose self-image was his central liability — brings to Julián an instrument that is, in the most useful sense, wrong for sentimental drama. His technique is theater-formed: precise, composed, capable of holding two things simultaneously without resolving either. His Julián does not arrive broken or overtly remorseful. He arrives as himself, which is the problem. A genuinely humbled Julián would be structurally easier for Boris, and dramatically far less interesting. The version Martínez plays — pride and vulnerability in simultaneous operation, the gap between what the character believes he is owed and what he actually deserves — is the version the film needs, and it is to the production’s credit that it casts a performer who will not soften that gap with sympathetic warmth.

Mayer is working in inverse territory and carries the harder technical burden. His Boris must demonstrate, for the first hour of the film, that the containment of feeling is real and not merely performed — that the emotionally blocked surface is the result of 28 years of deliberate internal organization, not absence of interior life. Trained in musical theatre before a career in Argentine television that culminated in serious dramatic work on Barrabrava and Iosi, el espía arrepentido, Mayer brings a naturalistic physical presence that operates in the register of credibility rather than display. Where Martínez controls the space with theatrical authority, Mayer inhabits the body with the slightly unresolved energy of someone whose emotional formation was interrupted. The asymmetry between the two performers — the theatrical father who composes himself against the world and the naturalistic son who carries his incompleteness in his body — is structurally correct, and the film deserves credit for casting it with this specific gap in mind.

Clinical psychology describes what happened to Boris as attachment damage caused not by abandonment in the generic sense but by what schema therapists identify as the deliberate substitution wound: a child who receives the message not that they are unloved but that they are the lesser option. John Bowlby’s foundational work on the internal working model — the mental representation of self and others that forms in early childhood and filters all subsequent relationships — suggests that the specific damage here is not fear of future abandonment but something more structurally embedded: the inability to locate one’s own value independent of the judgment that was made against it. Boris did not lose a father. He received a verdict. Every Iguazú tour he leads is, in some subterranean way, a demonstration of competence addressed to a jury that stopped paying attention before he could finish his argument.

This is the territory that separates The Giant Falls from its most direct Argentine predecessor and the comparison it must reckon with: El hijo de la novia, Juan José Campanella’s 2001 Oscar-nominated comedy-drama, which established the contemporary benchmark for Argentine popular family cinema. Campanella’s film also concerns a son, a father, and the complicated arithmetic of what they owe each other — but the moral geometry is inverted. In Son of the Bride, the father is devoted; it is the son who has withdrawn, who has been too busy and too defended to attend to what his parents need. The reconciliation in Campanella’s film flows from the son toward the father, and it is earned because the son has genuinely failed. The Giant Falls inverts the moral direction completely, and must work in harder territory: a son who has done nothing wrong and a father who did everything that matters, returning now because he is dying and has needs of his own. Whether Boris’s eventual opening toward Julián is a genuine act of forgiveness or an extraction made possible by the emotional coercion of proximity to death — that is the question the film is not entirely certain it wants to face.

The terminal illness device is the film’s most exposed structural choice. Julián returns not just with guilt but with urgency — the narrative provides a deadline that forces Boris’s hand in ways the drama might not otherwise manage to force it. This is a convention of the genre, and it has legitimate dramatic uses: urgency clarifies choices, proximity to death reorganizes priorities. But it also compromises the purity of the reconciliation question. A Boris who opens toward his father because the man is dying is not quite the same as a Boris who opens toward his father because he has arrived at something genuine. Carnevale’s instinct — consistent across a career he has described as animated by a desire to show people what they are capable of feeling — is toward resolution. The film moves, in its final movements, toward warmth and the possibility of repair. Multiple early critics observe that Boris’s accumulated pain dissolves with suspicious speed after the single scene in which he finally speaks it. Whether that speed is a dramatic shortcut or an honest account of how quickly a person can move when the right opening finally comes is a question the audience must settle for themselves.

What Mayer does in that late scene — the moment in which Boris releases what he has organized himself not to feel — is the film’s performance proof. He has spent the preceding hour demonstrating, through physical constraint and emotional availability in the wrong direction, that Boris is a man who has learned to live beside his own wound without touching it. When the wound speaks, it speaks through a 35-year-old man who is also, in some essential way, still seven. La Nación’s critic observes that Mayer executes the scene with considerable skill despite the script’s limitations — a judgment that is both a compliment and a diagnosis.

The Giant Falls arrives on Netflix globally from April 1, 2026, following a limited theatrical release in Argentina beginning March 26. Filmed entirely in Misiones province, with Horacio Maira as director of photography and original music by Iván Wyszogrod, the production was supported by the Instituto de Artes Audiovisuales de Misiones and uses the Parque Nacional Iguazú and Puerto Libertad as its principal locations. It is produced by Leyenda Films and Kuarzo International Films. The full cast includes Inés Estévez as Leticia, Boris’s mother; Luis Luque as Bebe; and Johanna Francella as Mich, Boris’s partner. At 100 minutes, it is Carnevale’s most recent and most intimate feature, part of Netflix’s expanded Argentine slate following the global breakout success of El Eternauta in 2025.

What the film ultimately asks its audience to sit with is not whether forgiveness is possible — it always is, clinically, philosophically, cinematically. The question it cannot answer, the one it will leave open in the viewer’s chest on the way home from wherever they watched it, is whether a dying man’s need for absolution creates an obligation in the child he most wronged. Boris did not choose to be available for this. He did not choose for Julián to return on Julián’s timeline, with Julián’s deadline, converting Boris’s open wound into a resource his father needs to feel better about having made it. Whether Boris’s eventual opening is freedom or surrender — that question falls precisely at the waterfall’s edge, enormous and indifferent, and it does not stop for either of them.