Manolo Caro, the queer Mexican filmmaker who created the very successful Netflix series THE HOUSE of FLOWERS is back.  His new three part series SOMEONE HAS TO DIE  a delightfully campy melodrama set in Franco’s Spain in the 1950’s is already becoming another big hit, especially with the LGBTQ Community.

The new series doesn’t just unite Caro with his  muse, Cecilia Suárez but also includes the veteran fabulous award winning actress Carmen Maura who is Pedro Almodóvar’s muse.

The action starts with the return of Gabino (Alejandro Speitzer) to his family’s mansion in Madrid after a 10 year absence in Mexico.  Nothing is really said about why he had been in exile, but we presume that it had to escape The Civil War and the new Franco regime.

His father was now a Bureaucrat in charge of Prisons and was engaged in an underhand deal supplying his best friend free labor from prisoners to work in his shoe factories.  Both men were to gain a lot from the deal, and they had decide to cement it with a marriage between their offspring.

We immediately knew  that was a nonstarter as Gabino had brought home Lazaro (Isaac Hernández) a drop-dead handsome Mexican dancer  who we quickly assumed was the love of Gabino’s life.  But we also learnt just as quick that in this sometimes hilarious melodrama (which so often felt like a Mexican Soap Opera) nothing was what it seemed to be.

 

 

In fact in the first two episodes Caro went out of his way to give every single character some sort of secret troubled past.  He was making it difficult  for us to guess who the ‘someone’ alluded to in the title was going to actually die.  It could be any, and everyone.

One thing was certain that no-one was happy with their given lot in life, and far too many of them seem to want to blame it on the ‘alleged’ gay men in their midst.

If we were to fault Caro for this otherwise extremely entertaining drama, it was that he rushed too much detail in these three episodes.  It deserved  a longer more drawn out series where there was time to fully develop all the characters.

But far worse than that Netflix almost ruined the whole thing by DUBBING IT.  It’s like dumbing down think that audiences cannot deal with subtitles.  So watch the Spanish version instead that does have subtitles