< She can communicate with ghosts. Here's what she learns from the 'Sad Dead'

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. The new Netflix series "My Sad Dead" is about a Buenos Aires doctor with the power to communicate with ghosts. It brings together two of Latin America's most acclaimed storytellers, Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín and Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez, whose short stories form the basis for the show. Our critic at large, John Powers, says that "My Sad Dead" takes the horror genre in weirdly compelling directions you can't quite predict.

JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: Even if you don't believe in them, ghost stories are eerie. They take place on the threshold between our daily world and a mysteriously unknown realm. Now, many movies and books cross this threshold merely to scare the bejesus out of us. But the greatest ghost stories aim to do something more, such as capturing the weight of Mexico's past, like Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Páramo," or exploring one's own madness, as Stanley Kubrick does in his adaptation of Stephen King's Much saner "The Shining."

You find that brand of ambition in "My Sad Dead," a new Spanish-language Netflix series centering on a woman who can see and talk to ghosts. Weaving together three short stories by Mariana Enriquez, who's been dubbed the sorceress of Buenos Aires horror, this four-part show was directed by Pablo Larraín, the Chilean filmmaker who's best known here for movies about Jackie O., starring Natalie Portman, and Lady Di, starring Kristen Stewart. But Larraín's always at his best closer to home, and here he's made a show whose blend of creepiness, melancholy, sarcastic humor and political anger is unlike anything else on TV.

Mercedes Morán stars as Emma, an antisocial, 60-ish doctor, who has a gift or maybe a curse. She can see and communicate with ghosts. Forced into retirement, she moves into her family's grand old house to live with her dead mother, who's still present and grumbling as a ghost. Now, Emma can't help the dead resolve their problems, like Jennifer Love Hewitt did on that old show "Ghost Whisperer." But she can calm them by talking to them. Emma spends her days soothing the dead, swapping barbed words with her photographer daughter who feels ignored in favor of the dead and going to community meetings.

Life gets trickier when her sister and brother-in-law fly down from the U.S. along with their daughter, Julie - that's a terrific Carolina Sánchez Álvarez - whom they intend to stick in a mental institution. Her parents are horrified by her obesity and loud moans during supposed orgies with the dead. But Emma feels a bond with her niece. And when Julie escapes, it triggers a series of events in which suddenly everyone in her neighborhood can now hear the cries of the dead, which drives them mad. When three joyful young women are gunned down in a gang killing, locals call on Emma to help stop the victim's incessant wailing. She grudgingly does this, but also begins searching for Julie.

Now, both Enriquez and Larraín are fascinated by the liminal space connecting life and death, but they're not interested in telling a conventionally scary horror story. "My Sad Dead" has no lurid melodrama, no shock cuts. Instead, it uses ghosts to evoke the actual material horrors of today's Latin America, where the powerful wound and ignore the powerless. This is a hard thing to pull off on screen, but Larraín does a terrific job of conjuring up Emma's somewhat alternate reality. The cinematography has a slightly bleached out old videotape look, which makes the physical world feel a tad transparent, open to the other side.

And individual images are often uncanny, from the camera's smooth glide as it follows Emma through Buenos Aires to the overhead shots looking straight down at scenes of death and dying. Is this ghost cam? Larraín shows how Emma's once-fancy neighborhood is turning into a ghost of its former self, hemmed in by soulless architecture, druggy encampments and housing projects exploding with violence.

With her distant gaze and lank ash gray hair, Emma looks like a seer, a somewhat irascible one, who Morán imbues with riveting charisma. Where Julie loves her close encounters with ghosts - her smile is a wonder - Emma is worn down by decades of helping suffering spirits find momentary peace. This only makes her angrier at her country's rulers for failing to look after all the Argentine people. In those community meetings, she snaps at her middle-class neighbors for despising the poor or letting fear of crime lead them into calls for quasi fascist policing.

I think it's not accidental that Enriquez and Larraín should be drawn to ghost stories with their intrusion of past lives into the present. They grew up in countries where thousands were disappeared by military juntas in the '70s and '80s. Both Argentina and Chile are still haunted by their political victims. And you sense this watching "My Sad Dead." Emma feels a responsibility to the dead, to hear what they have to tell us. The better to understand our responsibility to the living.

GROSS: John Powers reviewed the new series "My Sad Dead," which is streaming on Netflix.

FRESH AIR's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Staniszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. Our cohost is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN SCOFIELD'S "BUSTED")

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