What Kind of Film Is 'My Sad Dead'? Variety's Answer: All of Them at Once

Variety's review of Pablo Larraín's “My Sad Dead” describes a film that is macabre and melancholy but “suffused with a delicious absurdism” — and, crucially, that does not let that absurdism clog the arteries of its hopeful little heart. The critic's shorthand for the whole thing is that it is about 20 things at once in every moment. It is a ghost story, obviously, on account of all the ghosts; it is also a droll tragicomedy with an eccentrically deadpan streak, and the reviewer's verdict is that it is terrific. The useful idea in that description is a claim about tone as engineering: absurdity here is not decoration or a wink at the audience, but the element that keeps the melancholy circulating instead of hardening into a dirge. Plenty of films mix grief and comedy and end up with neither; the critic's point is that in this one the mixture is load-bearing, which is why “about 20 things at once” reads as praise rather than a warning label.