A political thriller often begins with an external threat, a shadowy force seeking to disrupt the established order. Maledictions opens with something far more unsettling: a betrayal from within. The series presents Governor Fernando Rovira, a man navigating a contentious legislative battle over lithium mining in his Argentinian province.
His world is thrown into chaos when his twelve-year-old daughter, Zoe, is abducted. The shock is amplified when the kidnapper is revealed to be Román Sabaté, Rovira’s own trusted aide and confidant. The act immediately shifts the story’s gravity from a political crime to a deeply personal one.
The fight over the mining bill provides a convenient public motive, a clear demand tied to a piece of legislation. Yet the story skillfully plants the suggestion that this public conflict is merely a cover for a private war, with its true origins hidden in the shared history of two men who were once allies.
A Movie’s Bones in a Series’ Skin
Streaming platforms have made the definition of a “series” quite flexible, and Maledictions is a prime example of this trend. With three forty-minute episodes, its total runtime is that of a standard feature film. The narrative architecture supports this reading, representing a conscious choice about how to deliver this specific story.
The show is built as a classic three-act structure, with each episode serving a distinct function. This is not a story that needed six or eight episodes to unspool its secrets; its creators understood that its power was in its compression.
The first act introduces the present-day crisis, setting the kidnapping and the political stakes in motion. The tension is built through a deliberate withholding of information. We see the event, but we lack the context. The second episode then abandons the present entirely for an extended flashback to thirteen years prior, signaled by a shift in the screen’s aspect ratio—a familiar cinematic cue to guide the viewer into a different temporal space.
This structural choice is the show’s most significant gamble. Instead of intercutting past and present, a common technique in modern thrillers to maintain suspense, the creators opt for a full, uninterrupted immersion in the past.
This forces the viewer to shift gears, from a fast-paced thriller to a slower, more character-focused drama. The effect is twofold. It front-loads the emotional “why” before the story returns to the climactic “what happens,” ensuring the final confrontation is rich with meaning. It also shows confidence in the backstory, treating it not as supplementary material but as the narrative’s true center.
The third episode returns to the present, its action now re-contextualized by what we have learned. The rhythm quickens again, but the stakes feel entirely different. This method creates an exceptionally lean narrative. By excising nearly all subplots, the story maintains a constant forward momentum.
This model of storytelling reflects a larger shift in the streaming landscape, an attempt to find a middle ground between the commitment of a full season and the brevity of a movie. It offers a complete, contained narrative that respects the viewer’s time. This brevity comes at a cost, however.
The compressed timeline leaves little room to flesh out the political world, which can feel more like a sketch than a fully realized system. Certain family histories and past accidents are alluded to with a quickness that feels underdeveloped, leaving the impression that a richer novel was streamlined, perhaps too aggressively, for the screen. The structure is effective, but its efficiency leaves some of the story’s textures unexplored.
The Puppet, The Matriarch, and The Ghost
The characters in Maledictions operate within a strict hierarchy of power, one that has little to do with official titles. Governor Rovira may be the public face of authority, but he is a man hollowed out by ambition and indecision. Leonardo Sbaraglia’s performance captures this emptiness perfectly.
He portrays Rovira not as a malevolent leader but as a weak one, a man perpetually out of his depth whose expressions flicker between a politician’s practiced confidence and a lost boy’s panic. His actions are dictated by a desperate need for approval, making him a puppet to stronger wills. He is a collection of accomplishments that belong to others, leaving him without a core identity of his own.
His strings are pulled by his mother, Irene. As the family matriarch, played with a chilling stillness by Alejandra Flechner, she is the story’s true gravitational center. Irene is a masterful creation, a provincial Lady Macbeth who wields power not with loud threats but with quiet, unnerving certainty.
Flechner’s performance is a study in economy; she controls every scene with a slight narrowing of her eyes or a carefully chosen word. Her authority comes from a deep, institutional power she has cultivated for decades, and she views her son’s career as a project she manages. Her manipulation is so complete that Fernando seems incapable of distinguishing his own desires from hers.
In contrast, the kidnapper Román is presented not as a simple villain, but as a man acting on a long-held grievance. Gustavo Bassani plays him with a stoic, almost bland exterior, which could be misread as a lack of depth. It is more accurately a portrait of a man who has suppressed a deep emotional wound for years, allowing it to harden into a cold resolve.
His actions are not chaotic; they are the result of a meticulously planned scheme. His dynamic with Zoe, the captive, is one of the show’s most layered elements. He is her kidnapper, yet he exhibits a strange protectiveness over her. She, in turn, is resourceful and tough, showing a familiarity with Román that hints at a pre-existing bond.
Their interactions are freighted with unspoken history, planting the seeds of the past long before the flashback episode makes it explicit. Their relationship becomes a microcosm of the show’s central idea: that personal histories are far more powerful than political allegiances.
The Public Price of Private Sins
The machinery of a political thriller drives the plot of Maledictions, but the engine is a story of personal betrayal. The timely subject of natural resource exploitation and state corruption provides a credible framework for the drama. The battle over lithium mining is the visible conflict, the one debated in offices and reported in the news.
This political stage, however, is a perfect metaphor for the story’s core conflict. Rovira and his family see the province’s natural resources as something to be exploited for personal gain, a reflection of how they treat the people around them. Loyalty and human life are commodities, disposable in the pursuit of power. The land itself is a victim of their ambition, just as Román was.
The series argues that such public battles are often facades for private resentments. The real conflict is not about a law; it is about events that occurred more than a decade earlier. The choice to adapt Claudia Piñeiro’s novel by shifting the political issue to lithium mining is a telling one.
It grounds the story in a very contemporary, global anxiety about environmentalism and the ethics of extraction, making the narrative feel urgent. This change demonstrates a thoughtful approach to adaptation, tailoring the source material to resonate with current issues.
The title itself points to the story’s thematic heart. The “maledictions,” or curses, at play here are not supernatural. They are the human-made curses of family legacy, of secrets held for too long, and of betrayals that fester over time. Irene’s influence is a curse on her son, stunting his growth and making him incapable of moral courage.
The events of the past are a curse on Román, trapping him in a cycle of resentment from which he can only escape through a drastic act. The show suggests that the greatest corrupting force is not politics itself, but the unresolved wounds of personal history. Maledictions uses its compact runtime to tell a focused story about how old secrets can erupt into the present, shattering the carefully constructed realities of the powerful and proving that no political victory can erase a private sin.
Maledictions is a six-episode miniseries from Argentina that premiered on Netflix on September 12, 2025. It is a political thriller and drama series. The plot follows a president who is working on a career-defining vote on lithium mining when he learns his daughter has been kidnapped, bringing old betrayals and conspiracies to light. It is available to watch on Netflix.
Full Credits
Director: Daniel Burman, Martin Hodara
Cast: Leonardo Sbaraglia, Mónica Antonópulos, Gustavo Bassani, Alejandra Flechner, Francesca Varela
The Review
Maledictions
Maledictions is a sharply constructed thriller that functions best when viewed as a film arbitrarily divided into three parts. Its greatest strength is its disciplined focus; the story uses its lean, three-act structure to explore how a festering personal betrayal can erupt into a public crisis. Anchored by a truly formidable performance from Alejandra Flechner, the series is a tense and intelligent examination of power. Its narrative efficiency, however, leaves the surrounding political world feeling thin, and some character motivations remain sketched rather than fully drawn.
PROS
- A lean, efficient narrative structured like a three-act film.
- Alejandra Flechner delivers a commanding and memorable performance as the family matriarch.
- The political thriller framework is used intelligently to explore deeper personal themes.
- The story is tense and well-paced, avoiding unnecessary subplots.
CONS
- The compressed runtime leaves some political and family storylines feeling underdeveloped.
- Certain central performances can seem overly reserved or understated.
- The rigid structure feels more like a segmented movie than a true episodic series.
