Something to watch tonight: Friday 27 June

The Eternaut (Stagnaro, 2025)

When the editor-in-chief and I fin­ished sea­son two of Andor (which needs no recom­mend­a­tion assist­ance from this news­let­ter), we decided that it was time to take a break from science-fiction and post-apocalyptic scen­ari­os. And also shows about rich people’s prob­lems. And crime (true or otherwise).

As you can ima­gine, that doesn’t leave very much.

The EIC went into Covid isol­a­tion last week, so I found myself almost instant­an­eously break­ing those self-imposed rules and blitz­ing all six epis­odes of The Eternaut in one lengthy ses­sion. I chose it because the Argentinian set­ting was likely to provide a dif­fer­ent sort of vibe to the usu­al sci-fi/post-apocalypse scen­ario that we have become so tired of. (I also spent three days in Buenos Aires ten years ago so con­sider myself some­thing of an expert …)

Also, The Eternaut stars the ubi­quit­ously Argentinian Ricardo Darín, an act­or now in his sixth dec­ade on screen and someone who I once spec­u­lated had to be cast in all Argentinian pro­duc­tions by some kind of act of parliament.

I have a soft spot for Darín because he was the lead in the first film I pro­grammed for the Paramount back in 2001, Son of the Bride. He’d already become a bit of an art­house darling after the heist thrill­er Nine Queens the year before but Son of the Bride would become the first of four films that he was in to be nom­in­ated for the Best Foreign Language Academy Award. The Secret in Their Eyes (2009), Wild Tales (20014) and Argentina, 1985 (2022) are the others.

The Eternaut is based on an influ­en­tial Argentinian com­ic book series, ori­gin­ally from the late 1950s and updated in 1969. The reworked ver­sion evid­ently had a much more polit­ic­al angle and the cre­at­or, Héctor Germán Oesterheld, ended up being a ‘dis­ap­peared’ vic­tim of the author­it­ari­an régime in 1977.

Darín plays Salvo, vet­er­an of the war for the Malvinas in the early 80s, now an ordin­ary Buenos Aires bloke, sep­ar­ated from his wife (Carla Peterson) and just want­ing to enjoy his reg­u­lar Friday night game of cards with his mates. Suddenly, the power goes out across the city and a mys­ter­i­ous snow starts to fall – it’s a Southern Hemisphere Christmas so should be fine and warm. The group of card play­ers soon dis­cov­er that any con­tact with the snow means instant death.

The host of the game, Favalli (César Troncoso), turns out to be a bit of a hoarder and also a bit of an engin­eer, so he rigs up a suit with a gas mask, allow­ing Salvo to walk care­fully across the belea­guered city to try and find his miss­ing daughter.

The struc­ture is really neat. The first epis­ode is basic­ally inside Favalli’s house, the next broadens out to the neigh­bour­hood and when Salvo gets to his wife’s apart­ment it becomes clear that not every­one who has sur­vived is inter­ested in co-operation. 

In epis­ode three, we get to see much more of the city and why this might have happened – an elec­tro­mag­net­ic shock of some kind – and that it appears to have affected all of Latin America (at least). And in epis­ode four, it turns into an ali­en inva­sion mon­ster movie and by epis­ode five it becomes clear that there is way too much story here for it all to be wrapped up by epis­ode six (not least Salvo’s weird vis­ions return­ing him to his Falklands trauma).

Sure enough, it ends on a cliff­hanger but I’ll be there for the next sea­son, mainly because the char­ac­ter devel­op­ment for all these ‘ordin­ary people in extraordin­ary cir­cum­stances’ has been so effect­ive but also because the alleg­or­ic­al poten­tial for the story is start­ing to emerge. And Darín is superb, as always.

Where to watch The Eternaut

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Worldwide: Streaming on Netflix