Two weeks ago, I sat down to watch a miniseries called Two Graves. Nowadays, Netflix doesn’t reveal how many episodes a show or a miniseries has prior to its release. So, you are always in for a surprise, and I was kind of shocked to see just three episodes on the list. I wondered if the streaming platform had forgotten to upload the rest or if the next few episodes were going to be released later on. But with each passing episode, it became clear that, no, that was it. A miniseries with three episodes. Now, in my honest opinion, I don’t think one should release anything that has a runtime of around three hours as an episodic affair; it should be a movie. If you breach that mark and get to five to six episodes, that warrants an episodic release. Three episodes, with each of them not even an hour long, seem like a symptom of the depleting attention span of viewers. How did we get here, though? Well, when The Irishman got its digital release, and people complained it was “too long” (even though they were used to binging shows for ten hours straight), some genius proposed an act-wise viewing schedule. And I feel that stuff like Two Graves and the topic of today’s discussion, Maledictions, is a result of that tweet.
Daniel Burman and Martin Hodara’s Maledictions, which is based on Claudia Pineiro’s novel Las Maldiciones, tells the story of Roman Sabate, a colleague of Governor Fernando Rovira, who has kidnapped the politician’s daughter, Zoe. Since Fernando is busy with a bill that’s about to be passed, which will protect several towns from being destroyed just so that a bunch of private corporations can mine the land for lithium, he doesn’t realize what has happened with his daughter. It’s only after Zoe’s usual driver, Beto, manages to get to a telephone—after being knocked out and thrown somewhere in the middle of a desert by Roman—that he understands that the situation with his daughter is pretty serious. Without wasting another second, Fernando calls in his family’s right-hand man, Rogelio Vargas, and the police officer Juan Carlos Ortiz to look into the matter. While Ortiz starts his manhunt, Vargas looks inwards—after being ordered to do so by Fernando’s dominating mother, Irene—by rummaging through Roman’s work station. That’s where Vargas finds documents concerning the lithium exploration project as well as the map that leads to the location where certain confidential property papers are stored. So, Vargas goes after Roman whilst under the assumption that he has suddenly become an environmentalist and wants to use Zoe to get the bill to pass. However, there’s more to this case than meets the eye.
Burman and Hodara, along with co-writers Natacha Caravia, Andres Gelos, and Pablo Gelos, cover a number of relevant topics. For starters, environmental issues not being taken seriously by politicians is a major plot point. It reflects how, with the rise of fascism all over the world, there seems to be a concerted effort to downplay climate change. Some say it’s a topic that only “those wokes” like to talk about, and others say that people are being alarmists for pointing out all the weather anomalies. And it’s those very critics who pray to the Almighty and wonder why the drought destroyed their crops, the flood washed away their property, and the cold killed their loved ones. Then it goes into a discussion about power and how, after a certain point, politicians see everyone as pawns who can be moved as they please. It’s only after said pawns refuse to budge that they realize that they’re not living in a simulation, and that actions actually do have consequences. In addition to all that, the miniseries also delves into parenthood; who treats it as a burden versus who treats it as a gift, what the long-term effects of bad parenting versus good parenting are, and why we should never treat our children like investment schemes.
Now, while the themes are good and even the story is pretty decent, it’s the storytelling and creative choices that just suck the life out of the whole thing. For starters, why do we get an extended flashback for the one thing that didn’t need a flashback? It’s the one thing that doesn’t need an elaborate explanation, and yet we are forced to sit through an incredibly boring party with an implicit sex scene tacked on at the end. Stuff like the land ownership, an accident that happened in Roman’s family, and a death in Fernando’s family—these are the plot threads that needed to be unspooled in great detail. However, all you get are vague explanations and a haphazard conclusion. That brings me back to the topic of this three-episode nonsense. I haven’t read the book, but I am taking a wild guess here: the contents of those pages required more than three episodes in order to be adapted properly. I suppose the makers couldn’t decide if they wanted to turn Pineiro’s words into a movie or a TV series. And that’s how they ended up with this middle-of-the-road product, neither a movie nor a proper miniseries. It both has enough time to dissect its characters and its narrative, and it doesn’t have enough time to do any in-depth examination of its subject matter. Essentially, it’s a paradox, but not a thought-provoking one, just one that’s dull and boring.
Coming to the performances in Maledictions, Gustavo Bassani is quite bland. Francesca Varela is alright. Leonardo Sbaraglia fares relatively better than the rest of the primary cast. Emiliano Kaczka’s stoic and scary act is solid. But I think it’s Alejandra Flechner who steals the show completely. In comparison to the aforementioned actors, she doesn’t have a lot of screen time. However, every time she appears on the screen, she fills it with intrigue and dread. In fact, Flechner is so good that I would have loved to see the entire story unfold just through her eyes; I think that would have been far more compelling than watching two wooden men have a wonky ideological battle. The visuals of this “miniseries” are just too basic. There are a few wide shots of the landscape that look awesome; everything else, though, is too dry. I mean, the showrunners cut corners almost everywhere, so I suppose I am the fool here for expecting them to cover their flaws with some half-decent cinematography and editing. Look, I can go on and on about this project’s shortcomings, but the bottom line is that you should stop fooling me with these three-episode miniseries, especially when they’re based on a book. Please stop releasing the three acts of a movie as three separate episodes. Either make a lengthy movie or a proper TV series. If you can’t do either of those two things, find some other vocation. I am done dealing with this type of garbage being peddled in the name of content.
