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.

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Where to watch The Eternaut