When Sanity Gets Drenched: Rodrigo García and the Art of Losing Your Mind

There’s something about the rain in Mexico City that isn’t just meteorological; it’s temperamental. Anyone who has been trapped in traffic on a flooded viaduct knows that under that lead-gray sky, civility hangs by a very fine thread. It is precisely this setting—a day of biblical downpours and urban chaos—that Rodrigo García has chosen for his ambitious new film, The Follies. And he couldn’t have picked a better backdrop to ask us: how long until we all snap?

This isn’t a textbook story about mental illness, nor is it a sterile clinical drama. It’s something much closer and more terrifying. It’s an x-ray of that exact moment when the “good people,” the functional professionals, and the perfect mothers, decide they can no longer pretend. García, who has built a solid career in Hollywood exploring the female psyche (Nine Lives, Mother and Child), returns to Mexico to orchestrate a symphony of contained screams that finally find their release.

The Cast as a Battlefield

If the script is the score, García has assembled the philharmonic orchestra of Latin American acting to perform it. It’s no exaggeration to say the casting is a “who’s who” of current talent. At the center of the hurricane is Cassandra Ciangherotti, playing Renata, a woman whose psychotic break is not an end, but the catalyst that pushes everyone else’s dominoes. Orbiting around her are figures who could carry any film on their own: Ilse Salas, Natalia Solián (whose rawness in Huesera still resonates), Naian González Norvind, Fernanda Castillo, and the formidable Ángeles Cruz. It’s six stories, six women, and a single day for everything to fall apart.

And to balance the scales—or perhaps to break them completely—are heavyweight male presences like the Chilean Alfredo Castro, a master of discomfort, alongside Raúl Briones, Daniel Tovar, and the legend Adriana Barraza. The interesting part isn’t just seeing “celebrities” together, but seeing them operate in an unusual register of intensity. The director himself has commented that the film has almost operatic, “Grand Guignol” touches, where reality is stretched until it breaks.

The Gilded Cage and the Downpour

Visually, the film promises to be an immersive experience. Igor Jadue-Lillo’s cinematography doesn’t seek tourist postcards of the capital, but rather its rougher, more claustrophobic texture: the wet asphalt, car interiors turned into confessionals and prisons, and that diffuse light that seems to crush the characters against the ground. Sandra Cabriada’s production design and Tomás Barreiro’s music work together to create that feeling of entrapment. Because in The Follies, the real enemy isn’t a soap opera villain; it’s social pressure. It’s the “self-censorship” and family expectations that, like a pressure cooker, need a release valve. The film’s thesis is provocative: in a world that demands an impossible normality, perhaps going “crazy” is the only genuine act of freedom we have left.

An Auteur Returns Home

Rodrigo García has achieved something difficult: shaking off the weight of being “Gabo’s son” to become, simply, Rodrigo. His cinema is urban, immediate, and psychological. Filming in Mexico (produced by Panorama Global), he seems comfortable, understanding the unwritten codes of a society where appearances are everything. His gaze doesn’t judge these characters who rebel; he accompanies them with an almost scientific curiosity, fascinated by these intelligent leaders who suddenly transition into mania and loss of control.

What to Know

The Follies arrives with the seal of approval from the Morelia International Film Festival, where it had its world premiere, and after a select run in Mexican theaters before its jump to global streaming. It’s a strong bet by Netflix on auteur cinema, on stories that are slow-burn but scorching to the touch. For those looking for a popcorn movie to tune out, this might not be the one. But for those who suspect “normality” is a sham and want to see what happens when we stop following the social script, it’s a must-see. The Follies premieres on Netflix this November 20.