This documentary, set in an old people’s home in Chile, exasperatingly fails to come clean about its own setup
There are moments of sweetness and sadness in Maite Alberdi’s documentary about an old people’s care home in Chile. But I couldn’t make friends with this film because of its pointless and twee contrivance, which undermined its genuine ideas. Not fakery exactly, but an exasperating lack of candour as to how this whole thing has been set up.
We begin by seeing a Santiago private detective, Rómulo Aitken, who has placed an ad in a paper for an elderly man to be a spy or “mole agent” in an old people’s home, posing as someone needing short-term respite care. With the aid of gadgetry such as hidden cameras and microphones he must find evidence of elder abuse. The detective’s client is evidently a woman whose mother, Sonia Pérez, is in this home, and the daughter is worried. So a very sweet and lovable widower called Sergio Chamy is finally recruited and installed as a resident.