The feature film
In the Hospital de Clínicas in Buenos Aires, Horacio Quiroga, master of Latin American horror, receives an irreversible diagnosis and watches as the stories from his most celebrated book, Stories of Love, Madness and Death, invade reality and force him to cross through his own work towards an inevitable fate.
María Ruisánchez Ortega Executive productionAlberto López Garrido
Reyes Arnal Risueño
Synopsis
The film follows Quiroga's final months in hospital. As morphine eases the pain, reality warps and the Misiones jungle, the protagonist of his stories, floods the space until it devours everything.
On this journey, Quiroga meets characters from his most universal tales: Drifting, The Decapitated Chicken, The Feather Pillow… His life and work merge into a feverish nightmare, exploring the themes that defined his existence: Love, Madness and Death.
Agony as the thread, the stories as a hallucinatory journey.
Characters
Horacio Quiroga
Horacio Quiroga has been torn from his natural element: the jungle. Confined to an urban setting he despises, he keeps the fierceness of his spirit, though dulled by pain and morphine. A stubborn, dark man, hardened by adversity, he must now face his final reckoning: a journey of introspection, hallucination and farewell before merging forever with the jungle.
María Elena Bravo
María is the practical counterpoint to our protagonist's hallucinations. She is the only one who knows the truth about his condition and carries the weight of the future. «Feet on the ground, what is, things just as they are».
Vicente Batistessa
A man with physical deformities whom Quiroga rescues from the hospital basement. His figure becomes a visual metaphor for the death that stalks him, a ghost who attends him in his agony.
Alfonsina Storni
An intellectual equal. She represents the respect of the artistic world and the kinship of those who understand the creator's soul.
The stories
The film weaves together eight tales drawn from Horacio Quiroga's original book Stories of Love, Madness and Death, set within a structure that moves in and out of each story through the figure of the protagonist. Each tale is a variation on the central triad: love, madness and death. The stories erupt into the hospital as physical experiences that transform the space and reveal hidden dimensions of the protagonist.
A sick young woman weakens inexplicably while an invisible presence inhabits her private world. Horror settles into the domestic space, silent and almost imperceptible.
A family marked by frustration and illness projects its violence onto the wrong target. Tragedy emerges from neglect and everyday brutality.
After a snakebite, a man drifts downriver as the venom spreads through his body. Nature neither intervenes nor saves: it simply carries on.
Men who risk their lives recovering logs swept along by the river face an unpredictable current. Everyday labour can turn tragic in an instant.
Curiosity leads to a paralysing experience deep in the jungle. The surroundings, seemingly harmless, prove relentless.
In the yerba mate plantations of Misiones, men subjected to a brutal system survive amid exploitation and physical exhaustion. Violence does not erupt: it settles in as an inevitable consequence.
A jeweller obsessed with perfection crafts a piece meant for the person he loves. The gleam of the stone holds a tension in which desire and possession edge towards an irreversible act.
On the open sea, loneliness and fear spread at the sight of abandoned vessels that seem to drag a dark fate behind them. The ocean blurs the line between suggestion and doom.
Some stories aren't told. They're felt.
And when they end, nature is still there.