Colombian-born filmmaker Rodrigo García entered the 21st century with a bang, earning recognition as a director to watch with his 2000 debut Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her. Serving as both director and screenwriter, that film marked the beginning of a career largely defined by intimate, character-driven stories centered on women.
That debut launched a remarkable run of films featuring first-rate actresses, most notably Glenn Close, who would go on to collaborate with García on a loose trilogy that included Nine Lives (2005); Albert Nobbs (2011), which earned Close one of her eight Academy Award nominations; and Four Good Days (2020), where she shines as a mother helping her daughter—played with thunderous intensity by Mila Kunis—through four crucial days of recovery from substance abuse.
García entered the third decade of the century with a pair of well-received streaming releases led by male protagonists, including Apple TV+’s Raymond & Ray (2022), starring Ethan Hawke and Ewan McGregor, and Netflix’s Familia (2023). The latter stars Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho (Bardo) as the patriarch of a mostly female household and earned García his first Ariel Award nomination for Best Director from the Mexican Academy of Film Arts and Sciences.
On November 20—a date commemorating the Mexican Revolution—García released his second Netflix production worldwide: The Follies (Las locuras). The six-episode drama unfolds around Renata (Cassandra Ciangherotti), a troubled woman under house arrest who serves as the connective thread between several interwoven stories. These narratives center on a diverse group of Mexican women pushed to their limits—sometimes self-imposed, sometimes dictated by the rigid expectations of the society surrounding them.
Continuing the tradition of García’s earlier work, The Follies features a deeply affecting, awards-worthy performance by Ciangherotti, who was previously nominated for a Best Actress Ariel for Familia. She is joined by an exceptional ensemble that includes Ilse Salas (also seen in Familia and recently in Rodrigo Prieto’s Netflix adaptation of Pedro Páramo); Academy Award nominee Adriana Barraza (Babel) as Salas’s mother; Ángeles Cruz (another Familia alum); and acclaimed Chilean actor Alfredo Castro (Desde Allá) as Renata’s father, among others.
The Follies may be an underrated work, easily overlooked within the vast streaming catalog, but it is a hidden gem waiting to be discovered by cinephiles. García is at the top of his form here, and his choral group of actresses delivers uniformly powerful performances in a story that feels informed by his early years as an independent filmmaker in Hollywood, while also echoing the claustrophobic tradition of Mexican cinema. One can sense the influence of Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962) and Arturo Ripstein’s El Castillo de la Pureza (1973)—films where characters are trapped physically or psychologically. Yet García’s women ultimately resist confinement, proving that institutions ranging from family to religion cannot keep them imprisoned forever.
Rating: 8.5/10