Ema has spent a life learning not to look. She is a doctor, recently retired, and she can see the dead — she calls them presences, as if a gentler word could hold them at a distance. The discipline of her whole existence has been refusal: not to let what she sees bind her to other people’s pain.

“My Sad Dead” (Mis muertos tristes) is a four-part supernatural drama for Netflix, directed by Pablo Larraín and adapted from four stories by the Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez. Its premise is plain and merciless: the dead do not leave. When Ema’s niece Julie arrives and three teenagers are killed nearby, the presences only Ema could see begin to appear to everyone, until an entire neighbourhood is living with its dead in plain sight.

For anyone who has followed Larraín, the surprise is not that he has made something with ghosts in it. He has been making one film about the dead for two decades. Post Mortem set its love story in the morgue of the 1973 coup; No measured a dictatorship by the images it left behind; El Conde turned Pinochet into a literal vampire who refuses to die. Even the works that look like portraits — Jackie, Spencer, the ferocious Ema — hold a single face in long, unbroken attention until a private grief becomes a public fact. A story about a woman who cannot stop seeing the dead is not a departure for him. It is the thesis stated openly.

What Enríquez brings is a grammar. In her fiction the supernatural is never decoration; it is how the unmourned come back to be counted. The series draws on four of her texts — the title story “Mis muertos tristes,” “Cuando hablábamos con los muertos,” “Julie” and “Un lugar soleado para gente sombría” — and Enríquez wrote the adaptation herself, alongside Guillermo Calderón and Anastasia Ayazi. On the page her ghosts are domestic and exact: teenagers who tried to summon the disappeared, houses that keep their tenants, grief that behaves like a contagion. That is a register Larraín’s slow, held camera has always been built for.

Enríquez is not a minor supplier of source material here. Over the last decade she has become the most internationally visible writer of Argentine horror: her collection “Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego” travelled into more than twenty languages, and her novel “Nuestra parte de noche” won Spain’s Premio Herralde in 2019. Her subject has stayed consistent — young women, cursed houses, the political dead of the 1970s pushing back through cracks in the ordinary. Handing her the pen on her own adaptation, rather than routing her prose through someone else’s screenplay, is the choice that most clearly signals what this series wants to be.

Four stories, four episodes: the structure sits closer to an anthology bound by one character than to a conventional serialized drama. Each Enríquez text carries its own dead — the teenagers who once tried to reach the disappeared in “Cuando hablábamos con los muertos,” the sunlit unease of “Un lugar soleado para gente sombría” — and the series is built to let them accumulate rather than tie off. The title is a ledger. My sad dead: the ones you carry, and cannot set down.

Both traditions point at the same wound. Enríquez writes out of an Argentina that never finished counting its dead; Larraín films a Chile that buried its violence without burying its bodies. “Los muertos” in this part of the world is not a horror flourish — it is a national accountancy, the desaparecidos who were never returned. To make the dead visible to a whole neighbourhood, all at once, is to stage the very thing a society keeps postponing: the moment it can no longer pretend not to see.

The series is carried by Mercedes Morán as Ema, with Dolores Fonzi as Julie and Alejandra Flechner among an ensemble that includes Germán de Silva, Carlos Portaluppi, Luz Jiménez and Carolina Sánchez Álvarez. It is produced by Fábula, the company Larraín runs with his brother Juan de Dios, which has become the engine room of contemporary Chilean cinema.

Fábula is not a boutique attaching its name to a foreign auteur’s whim. It produced Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman, which won the Academy Award for Best International Feature in 2018, and it has been the base for the run of Larraín films — from No to El Conde — that turned Chilean cinema into a fixture of the festival calendar. A four-part series is new territory for that operation; the ambition behind it is not.

The word Ema chooses — presences, not ghosts — is the tell. This is horror in the key of bereavement rather than fright: the dread of the persistent, not the sudden. Anyone arriving for jump scares may find something closer to a chamber piece about a woman negotiating with what she has lost; anyone arriving for Larraín will recognise the temperature at once.

The other unusual thing about “My Sad Dead” is that it exists twice. Before it reaches Netflix it competes at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, shown there as a feature-length film in the Official Selection. The same work is therefore both a competition title for one of Europe’s major festivals and a four-episode series for a streaming service — an auteur film and a Netflix run, depending on which door you walk through. That double life is its own small argument about where prestige now lives, and about who gets to decide whether four hours of Larraín counts as cinema or television.

Which leaves the question the premise cannot close, and should not. If the dead refuse to leave — if grief stops being private and becomes something a whole street can see — when is mourning allowed to end, and who gets to say it is over? A ghost story usually answers that by laying the spirit to rest. Enríquez and Larraín have built their careers on refusing exactly that comfort.

“My Sad Dead” (Mis muertos tristes) premieres on Netflix on 24 September 2026 in four episodes, after screening in competition at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, which runs 18 to 26 September 2026, in feature form. It is directed by Pablo Larraín, written by Mariana Enríquez with Guillermo Calderón, Anastasia Ayazi and Larraín, and produced by Fábula; the original dialogue is in Spanish.