Pablo Larraín, the son of Chile’s right who keeps filming Pinochet’s ghosts

Pablo Larraín

Photo: FICG.mx / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 19, 1976 Santiago, Chile
Occupation	Filmmaker
Known for	Spencer, Jackie, No
Awards	Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize, Berlin International Film Festival · Best Screenplay, Venice International Film Festival (shared) · Art Cinema Award, Directors' Fortnight, Cannes Film Festival · Platform Prize, Toronto International Film Festival

A retired doctor living across from a housing estate on the edge of Buenos Aires can hear the dead. Her mother is one of them, buried and still complaining from the next room. That is the premise of My Sad Dead, the Netflix miniseries Pablo Larraín adapted from the stories of Mariana Enriquez, and it doubles as a fair description of how the Chilean director has always worked. He moves in with the dead and waits for them to say what they left unsaid. Sometimes the ghost is Augusto Pinochet, whom he turned into a vampire still feeding at the age of two hundred and fifty. Sometimes it is a widow in a blood-stained pink suit, a princess dreading a royal Christmas, or a soprano who can no longer trust her voice.

The contradiction that makes him worth reading sits at his own family table. Larraín is the son of Hernán Larraín, a law professor who became a senator for the right-wing Independent Democratic Union, and of Magdalena Matte, housing minister under Sebastián Piñera. One great-grandfather, Arturo Matte, co-founded the paper giant CMPC; further back on the same tree stands Arturo Alessandri, twice president of Chile. A director from that lineage has spent nearly two decades putting the dictatorship on trial, and he has not been polite about where he thinks the blame lies. In Chile, he once said, the right that served the Pinochet government is directly responsible for what happened to culture in those years.

Santiago, the city where he was born on 19 August 1976, nearly three years into the military regime, is also where he studied audiovisual communication, at the Instituto Profesional IACC. In 2003 he and his brother, Juan de Dios, founded Fábula, the production company behind his films and a long list of other directors’ work. His own first feature, Fuga, came out in 2006.

Then came the three films he later called an unintentional trilogy. Tony Manero, shown in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 2008, follows a man in Pinochet’s Santiago so fixated on John Travolta‘s character in Saturday Night Fever that he kills to keep his imitation going. Post Mortem, in competition at Venice in 2010, puts a coroner’s assistant at the autopsy table during the days of the 1973 coup. No, in 2012, cast Gael García Bernal as the advertising man who sold the No vote in the 1988 plebiscite like a soft drink. It won the Art Cinema Award in the Directors’ Fortnight and became the first Chilean film nominated for the foreign-language Oscar.

None of those protagonists is a resistance hero, and that is the point and the problem. Back home, No drew some of the sharpest criticism of his career. Genaro Arriagada, who directed the real No campaign, accused the film of reducing the end of the dictatorship to a television campaign and ignoring the grassroots drive that registered voters. Larraín answered that a film is not a testament, only the way its makers chose to look. The defence is honest, and it describes his whole method. Larraín picks the most compromised witness in the room and films history through that person’s vanity, so audiences leave with a mood rather than a lesson. The same charge, that he prefers surfaces to causes, would follow him into his portraits of famous women.

The Club took the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at Berlin in 2015, with four disgraced priests hidden by the Church in a seaside town. Neruda reunited him with García Bernal in 2016 and turned the poet’s flight from the police into a chase narrated by the detective on his trail. The same year he made his first film in English. Jackie followed Jacqueline Kennedy through the days after Dallas, earned Natalie Portman an Oscar nomination and won the Platform Prize at Toronto. As a producer he was having an even better run: Fábula backed Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman, the first Chilean film to win the foreign-language Oscar.

After Ema, a Valparaíso dance drama that competed at Venice in 2019, came Spencer, with Kristen Stewart as Diana over three suffocating days at Sandringham, and an Oscar nomination for Stewart. He also directed Lisey’s Story, Stephen King‘s adaptation of his own novel for Apple TV+. Then he went home again. El Conde, made for Netflix and shot in black and white by Ed Lachman, imagined Pinochet as an immortal bloodsucker who wants to die. It won best screenplay at Venice in 2023 for Larraín and his regular co-writer Guillermo Calderón, and Lachman was nominated for an Oscar.

Maria closed the cycle in 2024: Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas in her last days in Paris, in an apartment of devoted servants and prescription pills. Jolie was nominated for a Golden Globe, Lachman for a second consecutive Oscar. Seen together, Jackie, Spencer and Maria tell one story three times, about a woman locked inside an image built by other people during the week it cracks. Admirers call that a signature; to sceptics it is a formula, and the two camps are describing the same films.

This year has been unusually busy. In February, at the European Film Market in Berlin, the brothers presented Pijama, a rental platform with no subscription that pays rights holders 80 per cent of each rental. Larraín pitched it as a response to a cultural crisis in which films that miss the handful of remaining buyers are simply shelved. In September My Sad Dead had its world premiere in the official competition of the San Sebastián festival, cut into a feature of nearly three hours, before it reached Netflix as a four-episode series on 24 September. Mercedes Morán plays the doctor, with Dolores Fonzi and Alejandra Flechner around her, and the script, written with Enriquez, Calderón and Anastasia Ayazi, is his first venture into Argentina.

He was married to the actress Antonia Zegers, who appears in several of his films, from 2008 to 2014, and they have two children. In the 2013 presidential election he publicly backed Michelle Bachelet, the centre-left candidate, while his parents remained in the conservative camp.

The next film goes straight to the date his whole filmography circles. Once, written with Calderón for Netflix and set to shoot in Chile, follows eleven intertwined stories across the eighteen hours of 11 September 1973, ending with the bombing of La Moneda and the death of Salvador Allende, played by Alejandro Goic. For two decades Larraín has filmed the coup from the morgue, the advertising agency and the vampire’s lair. This time he is going into the palace.