Summary
Maledictions benefits from its brevity and economy of storytelling, making fat-free political points through an engaging drama.
While watching Maledictions, it occurred to me that more shows should have the confidence to only run for three episodes. And you’d think, at least at a glance, that this would be the kind of story to run for six or even eight; a tangled web of political intrigue, hidden agendas, and family secrets weaving a conspiracy across thirteen years. But Daniel Burman’s adaptation strips away every non-essential element, leaving behind a lean, mean thriller blending the political and the personal to surprisingly engaging effect.
Those three episodes only run about forty minutes each, too. The impression is of a feature film split into three, but it doesn’t really play out like that, thanks to a middle flashback chapter that takes place entirely in the past (and in a different aspect ratio to make the point clear). This format works pretty well, with the premiere establishing the premise, the second episode explaining the underpinning history of the character dynamics, and the finale returning to thriller territory with the audience armed with all the appropriate context. It’s an effortless binge.
The plot revolves around Fernando Rovira (Leonardo Sbaraglia, Bird Box Barcelona), an Argentine provincial governor who is determined to block a congressional law that’ll limit his ability to exploit local lithium reserves. He’s in deep on the pocket-lining plan with a bunch of foreign corporate executives who all stand to heavily profit from the lithium excavation, everyday townsfolk be damned. But Rovira’s plans are scuppered when his 12-year-old daughter, Zoe (Francesca Varela), is suddenly kidnapped by his long-time ally and confidante, Román Sabaté (Gustavo Bassani), for initially unclear reasons. Román wants the law to pass, and Rovira is faced with a choice between his family and his political aspirations. For most, that’d be easy, but for him, his strings being pulled by a terrifyingly no-nonsense mother played by Alejandra Flechner, it’s no small matter.
The middle episode introduces much younger versions of Rovira and Román, and also Rovira’s late wife, Lucrecia (Monna Antonopoulos). Here, the true entanglement comes to the fore, which helps to lace the finale with more personal stakes. It’s an intriguing idea that goes beyond the obvious “affair” angle, effectively blurring the lines between personal and professional relationships and the endless question of what a man with almost everything will do to acquire the one thing that eludes him. Even though the present-day political plot about the exploitation of natural resources at the expense of local people is timely and well-argued, it is much less the point than these more incisive personal questions.
Rovira is a particularly compelling character in my mind because he’s thoroughly emotionally bankrupt but also sculpted by his environment. Every rung on his life’s ladder has been achieved thanks to leg-ups from his domineering mother and his insistent partners, leaving him no room to determine his own path or figure out, on some level, who he really is. This, I think, is how the truly wealthy and successful sometimes become so; they are nothing beyond their accomplishments and how much power they wield, so they pursue those accomplishments relentlessly and unendingly.
While it’s nothing new – many of these themes, especially the political ones, have backdropped many dramas on this very platform, several of them superior – Maledictions should nonetheless be admired for its brevity and economy of storytelling. That bit at the top about the value of three episodes wasn’t a flippant remark. There is nothing here that doesn’t serve the story being told, and that’s perhaps how it should be, even if the story, while relevant, is nonetheless unremarkable. In this culture of lowered attention spans and oversaturated streaming markets, the least demanding show can sometimes be the one that people gravitate to the most.
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