A Netflix Series Is Competing for San Sebastian’s Golden Shell, and It Drops Today

Mis muertos tristes screened in competition for the Golden Shell at San Sebastián on 20 September as a single film. It lands on Netflix today, 24 September, as four episodes. The jury announces on Saturday.

Pablo Larraín has described the feature cut as the four episodes joined with fades to black and no substantial changes to the content. Which raises the question the festival has not been asked: what exactly is in competition?

It is over three hours, not nearly three

Every write-up calls the festival cut "nearly three hours." The two outlets that print an actual figure give 186 minutes and 187 minutes — either way, comfortably past the three-hour mark, and one of them benchmarks it against a 178-minute Les Misérables to make the point.

The festival has published no official runtime at all. "Nearly three hours" is a rounding down that nobody checked, and it is in more or less every piece filed from San Sebastián this week.

The festival files it two ways, and admits it

• The Official Selection lists Mis muertos tristes in competition, alongside features by Mike Leigh, Nicole Garcia, Hans Petter Moland, Beniít and others.
• A film database files the same title as "Miniserie de TV (2026)." A Spanish-language encyclopedia entry files it as a web television series, one season, four episodes.
• And the festival's own news page, dated 19 September, describes another title in the Official Selection with the words "la serie El castillo (Sección Oficial fuera de concurso)" — the series El castillo, Official Selection, out of competition.

So one series is in competition as a feature and another is a series out of competition, in the same section, in the same week, and the distinction is drawn by the festival in its own copy.

What it actually is

• Four Mariana Enríquez stories, adapted together: the title story Mis muertos tristes (2024), Cuando hablábamos con los muertos (2013), Julie (2020) and Un lugar soleado para gente sombría (2024).
• Screenplay by four people: Enríquez, Guillermo Calderón, Anastasia Ayazi and Larraín himself — a credit most cast lists drop.
• Mercedes Morán as Ema, a doctor who retires at sixty and starts seeing and hearing the dead. Dolores Fonzi is her daughter Caro, a photographer; Alejandra Flechner is her sister Lidia; Carolina Sánchez Álvarez plays Lidia's daughter Julie in her first acting role. Also Carlos Portaluppi, Germán de Silva and Luz Jiménez as Ema's dead mother.
• Set in the Piedrabuena housing complex in Buenos Aires, with residents of the real estate appearing as extras.
• Exteriors in Buenos Aires, interiors in Santiago de Chile. It is billed as Larraín's first supernatural story after Jackie, Neruda and Spencer — a line that has been garbled elsewhere into a claim about it being his first Argentine shoot, which nothing supports.

Loose ends

• No official runtime. 186 and 187 both come from a single outlet each.
• Whether the Netflix drop landing two days before the awards was coordinated or collided. Neither the festival nor the streamer has said a word about it.
• Whether the four episodes differ from the feature cut at all. Larraín says no substantial changes; nobody has compared them.
• Whether the jury — presided over by Ira Sachs — was told to treat it as a feature. Nobody has asked.

The category problem festivals keep not solving

Cannes has had this argument. Venice has had it. San Sebastián has now arranged it so that both answers are true in the same section on the same weekend: a series competing as a film, and a series screening as a series.

On Saturday the jury may hand its top prize to something that will have spent two days on a streaming service in four parts. If it does, the interesting question is not whether that is allowed — it evidently is — but what the Golden Shell is for.

Larraín, meanwhile, is already shooting Once for the same streamer: eleven interwoven stories across the eighteen hours of 11 September 1973, ending at La Moneda, shot by Rodrigo Prieto. That one is a film.