Ratings444
Average rating3.7
It's called Mexican Gothic and right away it starts delivering on the title's promise.
A cryptic letter from her cousin Catalina complaining of restless dead, ghosts that whisper in the night, and a house sick with rot sends Noemi to El Triunfo.
There, set atop the sheer rock walls of the mountain and shrouded in a cold fog, lies High Place, a Gothic mansion complete with European dirt for the gardens. A bit of a conceit to sell the gothic story but I find that it's inspired by an actual place called Real del Monte, a British mining town in the highlands of Mexico complete with an English cemetery.
Inside the moldering walls where electricity is rationed necessitating gas lamps and candles, Noemi finds Catalina a pale shadow of her former self. Her English husband Virgil is irritatingly dismissive, there are eugenics journals in the library, and the pater familias Howard Doyle despite lying barely alive and afflicted by the ravages of putrefaction is still holding the house captive in his sway. Noemi soon finds herself victim to strange dreams and bouts of sleepwalking.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia doesn't miss a single gothic beat here and builds the mounting tension with a confident hand. I'd argue the climax switches from creeping gothic dread to tent-pole Bruckheimer spectacle but it'll make for great TV when the inevitable adaptation comes.