After working on Prime's TV series Verdict, Argentinian director Anahí Berneri has now made her Netflix debut with Elena Knows, a mother-daughter drama based on the book of the same name by famous novelist Claudia Piñeiro (International Booker Prize Shortlist). Berneri has not lost her arthouse touch, on the contrary, Elena Knows looks lush and minimal at the same time. With the use of shallow focus, the cinematography presents the world as an inhospitable place to the protagonist, Elena (Mercedes Morán, recently in Netflix's The Kingdom), whose advanced Parkinson's robs her of her agency, day after day. Very early on in the film, she loses her daughter and carer, Rita (Erica Rivas you might know from Wild Tales), and her absence leaves a gaping hole in the life of the grubby elderly woman. Berneri's newest film owns up to its investigative thriller elements as Elena insists her daughter has been murdered, but at its heart, it holds a paradox: that of maternal love and parental hatred. 

Mercedes Morán is a stunning lead, not only because she's well seasoned and a decades-long star of Argentinian cinema, but also due to her quiet and stoic performance as Elena. Throughout the film's runtime, we are by her side, sharing her impeded movements, her slow advances, the struggles to get up and sit down. The tone of the film is sombre and heavy with inadmissible guilt which then materializes as Rita, visions or memories of her at places she once accompanied her mother to. Elena sees her as a teenager, or as she was on the day she was found dead, and she doesn't even flinch. Morán is an exquisitely controlled actress, whose discipline belongs to a classic age of filmmaking, and in such a subdued film, she is the perfect fit.