Review | My Dear Caretaker – “Parasite”-style acid comedy series premieres on Star+

Since the South Korean film “Parasite” won the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film, among other awards, Western filmmaking has shifted more towards the stories of ordinary people, which bring even more wealth in the world. the stories. The current representative of Brazil at the Oscars, “Marte Um”, also addresses this theme, since one of the characters, the father, is a doorman in a bourgeois building. Also in the same vein, the great Argentine series “Meu Querido Zelador” recently premiered on StarPlus streaming, a program to watch in one go.

For nearly thirty years, Eliseo (Guillermo Francella) has worked in a building as a doorman and janitor, tending the premises, opening doors, helping with purchases, receiving orders and guiding other employees. His whole life is spent in this building, in the wealthy neighborhood of Buenos Aires. One day, he overhears a very suspicious conversation between the architect Florencia (Malena Sánchez) and the lawyer Doctor Zambrano (Gabriel Goity), which puzzles him until, during the condominium meeting, Eliseo infiltrates a walkie-talkie in the place to listen to the debate and discovers that the two residents have made a tempting proposal to the other owners: to build a swimming pool on the roof of the building. It wouldn’t be a problem, except that Eliseo’s house is right on the terrace, and, for the construction of the swimming pool, Zambrano and Florencia proposed to fire the caretaker and destroy his house. What they weren’t counting on was the ruse of ‘My Dear Caretaker’.

Divided into nine short episodes of around thirty minutes, ‘Meu Querido Zelador’ is a deliciously tangy comic series with touches of suspense and psychopathy. Guillermo Francella makes his character a docile and dear exemplary citizen, without vices, always consenting, but who will use all artifices to defend his permanence – and this is where the other side of this protagonist comes in, who also reveals himself to be a cold, calculating type, without remorse and very obsessed with each inhabitant, a real vower of the lives of others. The perfect alchemy between a great actor and the cutting-edge script by Martin Bustos.

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If, on the one hand, the series amuses and makes laugh, on the other hand, it makes a social criticism of the behavior of the richest beings, who commonly find themselves in the authority of throwing people away as if they were garbage. Every laugh we have at the story created by Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn leaves a bitter taste in our mouths, as we recognize these behaviors in society. This is what we see happening the most these days: companies dumping employees and service providers with no regard for labor rights, the impact this has on people’s lives and/or or in favor of so-called modernization, in which jobs are replaced by machines and self-service. It is the return disguised as “future”.

Don’t be surprised if you feel nervous watching episodes of ‘Meu Querido Zelador’, as a constant climate of “it’s going to go wrong” builds as the plot unfolds, stitched together by a detective thriller in which everything the world is suspect in a crime not yet committed, but which must be avoided by the protagonist. ‘My Dear Caretaker’ is a delicious and addictive series, full of revenge.

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