You’re Missing Out on One of the Best Horror Films To Hit Netflix in a Long Time

To say that the Netflix catalog is a hit-or-miss situation is hardly controversial nowadays. As a matter of fact, the same statement can be made about almost all of our giant, non-curated streaming services. It isn’t that rare for amazing movies and TV shows to pop up on these platforms, but quite often they tend to get buried under piles of titles that range from okay at best to horrifyingly bad. If you’re a horror fan, for instance, you might have missed one of the coolest, scariest, most disturbing films to hit Netflix in quite some time. After all, to finally come across Luis Javier Henaine’s Disappear Completely, one has to dig deep — almost as deep as the movie’s main character in his search for a cure to the curse that threatens to turn him into a kind of living corpse.

Having premiered in 2022 at Austin’s Fantastic Fest, Disappear Completely made its way onto Netflix earlier in April 2024. And while it made its way to the streamer’s Top 10 in its native Mexico, it has struggled to find an audience in other countries where it is readily available. It’s a pity: Henaine’s film has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and it is indeed a gem that deserves to be seen. Why it has not conquered audiences worldwide is hard to say. Perhaps Netflix hasn’t marketed it enough, or maybe it’s something to do with that pesky one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles. After all, it isn’t rare for international films — particularly genre films — to be overlooked only to be, years later, included in lists of underrated projects.

Disappear Completely

A suspenseful drama unfolds as a detective is drawn into the enigmatic case of a vanished artist in a secluded town. As he delves deeper, the detective encounters eerie visions and unsettling locals who challenge his grasp of reality. Each clue he uncovers draws him closer to a chilling discovery that challenges the very essence of existence.

Release Date

February 29, 2024

Director

Luis Javier Henaine

Cast

Harold Torres , Tete Espinoza , Fermin Martinez , Vicky Araico , Norma Reyna , Quetzalli Cortes , Eligio Melendez , Jose Manuel Poncelis

Runtime

106 Minutes

Main Genre

Horror

Writers

Ricardo Aguado-Fentanes , Luis Javier Henaine

What Is ‘Disappear Completely’ About?

As it is so new in the world of streaming, Disappear Completely still has a chance of being recognized in its time. The film, which relies more on psychological horror than on traditional jumpscares, is a character study surrounding a man’s relationship with his profession, and his family. The premise is creative and terrifying from the get-go: Santiago (Harold Torres), a photojournalist who sells pictures of crimes and accidents to tabloids, falls victim to a curse after shooting a particularly gruesome scene featuring a still living, but completely unresponsive politician partly devoured by rats. Unbeknownst to him, Santiago’s camera has captured the presence of a demonic entity that traps him in the same web as the senator (Juan Sahagun) he just photographed. Little by little, Santiago starts to lose all of his five senses.

As Santiago races against time to find a cure for his predicament, going from doctors to shamans to the very demon that has hexed him, his girlfriend, Marce (Tete Espinoza), faces troubles of her own. Pregnant with Santiago’s child, she wishes to have the baby and build a happy family. However, Santiago claims that they are not ready to have a child, and pressures her to have an abortion. This relationship with Marce and his unborn baby ends up being essential to how Santiago deals with his curse, being completely responsible for sealing his fate. By the end of the movie, just as he is about to lose the eyesight that is so dear to him, Santiago refuses to deliver his child’s life to the demon in exchange for everything he has lost and therefore becomes forever locked in a tomb made of his own flesh.

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Mixing an urban vibe with folk horror, Disappear Completely is a movie that dabbles in witchcraft, superstition, and politics, with the cursed senator having been victimized by a political rival. However, the focus of the plot is Santiago himself. The movie asks us to place ourselves in his shoes, forcing us to wonder what it would feel like to be in such a terrifying predicament. The final scenes make this invitation to identify with the main character all the more obvious: as Santiago is losing his sense of hearing, we can barely understand the sounds around him. Eventually, in the blink of an eye, the whole movie goes quiet. As he loses his sight, the image becomes blurry, until it… disappears completely. Seven long, despair-inducing seconds of dark screen stand between the last image of Marce calling Santiago’s name and the film’s end credits.

‘Disappear Completely’ Presents Photography as the Ultimate Horror

Disappear Completely presents us with a kind of horror that would be disturbing no matter who it befell. Still, when we take into consideration Santiago’s profession, the film gains additional layers. At the same time that Henaine and his fellow screenwriterRicardo Aguado-Fentanes ask us to identify with Santiago in his plight, they also make it pretty clear that he is someone we should despise. Santiago is not a tabloid photographer because that’s the only job he can find. On the contrary, he seems to enjoy taking pictures of mangled bodies and even attempts to make it into a form of high art. The movie shows us that he has fun creating tasteless titles for the stories that will accompany his pictures, and right in the beginning we learn that he is trying to sell some of his photos to art galleries. This is, in itself, terrifying: in a way, the biggest horror in Disappear Completely is becoming the subject of one of Santiago’s photographs.

A Susan Sontag quote that opens the movie gives us the key to interpreting the story in this sense. “Photography converts the whole world into a cemetery. Photographers, wittingly or unwittingly, are the angels of death.” In Disappear Completely, a still picture is not just a tomb in a graveyard because it depicts someone who might already be dead, but because having your picture taken is already a kind of death. You become unmoving, unfeeling, blind, and deaf, all at once. You might say something, of course, in the sense that all works of art say something, but you will never again respond to any stimuli.

When he is cursed, Santiago is doomed to become one of his own photographs. His fate is, in a way, an ironic punishment: he has condemned so many dead people to a living death that he will, himself, become a tomb in the cemetery that is the entire world. Disappear Completely is definitely a movie with something to say, and it turns its eyes specifically to the art of creating images. To an extent, it is even fitting to watch Santiago’s downfall happen in a movie instead of, say, reading about it in a book, for the image is essential for us to understand what is happening to him.

‘Disappear Completely’ Also Focuses on Santiago’s Relationship with His Unborn Child

But while photography, particularly Santiago’s kind of predatory photojournalism, and its meanings are at the center of Disappear Completely, Henaine and Aguado-Fentanes also go beyond the professional aspect of their protagonist. Well, in a way. Santiago’s relationship with Marce and their unborn child is marked by his career: it is because he hasn’t yet succeeded as a serious photographer that he believes it isn’t yet time for them to have a baby. When confronted with the opportunity to preserve the one sense that he needs for working in exchange for his child, though, Santiago chooses to let himself disappear completely.

Santiago sacrifices himself for his unborn child and, by extension, for the sake of Marce’s happiness. After all, she is the one who wants to have a child. But will Marce still want that baby now that her life has been upended so completely, now that she doesn’t have Santiago by her side anymore? What he does is completely remove himself from Marce’s life, thus leaving her alone to make a decision about her pregnancy and deal with the consequences. It is a selfish choice, but the reality is that there is no decision that Santiago could make that would not be selfish, as trading his baby’s life for his senses would prove tragic for both him and Marce. Either way, the demon forces Santiago to wallow in the selfishness that has ruined his life.

Disappear Completely ultimately wraps up with a fitting conclusion for Santiago. In his infinite suffering, he decides that the world would be a better place without him, for there is no answer that would satisfyingly end his suffering. He has already done too much to be forgiven. He’s already drowned in hubris, having been a man who mocked the death of others and who refused the happiness of the woman who lived with him. He turns the world into a cemetery and thus deserves to be buried alive. Is it a sad conclusion? You bet it is. But, quite often, the best horror stories have a tinge of tragedy to them.

Disappear Completely is available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.

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