In The Other Side, Nacho Nieto (Berto Romero) has a YouTube channel that no one sees. He wanted to be an eminence of the paranormal but he fell into oblivion due to the success of a television presenter with no journalistic ethics but a lot of sensationalist streak. After a failed suicide attempt, he acquires an ability: being able to talk to his late mentor, Dr. Estrada (Andreu Buenafuente).
When he is presented with the opportunity to investigate some inexplicable events in the apartment of a widowed woman (María Botto) and her teenage son (Hugo Morenilla), he does not hesitate to take advantage of it, especially thanks to the doctor, who helps him abandon his passive attitude. before life. Everything indicates that there is a supernatural presence in that home: on his first visit, the widow’s son levitates before her eyes.
After the critical success of Look What You’ve Done, where Berto Romero was able to vent about the obligations, joys and ironies of his life as a family man, the comedian once again ventures into horror comedy at Movistar Plus, a risky field. due to the difficulty of organically fitting both genres together.
With the help of Enric Pardo and Rafel Barceló, with whom he wrote his previous series, he resists the instinct to take The Other Side into the realm of parody. In the paranormal, which includes vibrating pipes, cracking tiles and ghosts that open the door, there is a comical point but above all a reverential respect for the genre.
This idea of ??balance is present on all fronts of the series, which serves as a traditional x-ray of society, starting from the brilliant idea of ??the haunted house: it is not a historic and isolated mansion but a working-class apartment in a building of neighbors as humble as they are gossips. None of the actors is out of place in a vehicle that, precisely because of the search for a particular tone and straddling different worlds (comedy, horror and even drama), could lead to interpretive dissonance.
In fact, the episodes slide by so easily that one can even imagine the script with some kind of measurement to reconcile the tones, the entrances and exits of characteristic characters or the minutes allocated to flashbacks to the past. This, it must also be recognized, also limits the more dramatic possibilities, especially taking into account the direction that the case takes (and which it is better not to go into so as not to spoil the viewer’s experience). Having everything so controlled, a certain search is missing.
Regarding the character of Buenafuente, his doctor Estrada serves as the main comic element with his comments from another era: he confronts us with the misogynistic mental framework in which we have lived peacefully as a society for so long (and in which so many are still installed). . And the transcript of Iker Jiménez played by Nacho Vigalondo serves to denounce the instigators of the reactionary and anti-scientific extreme right. Isn’t it a curious choice that Romero uses precisely the supernatural to delve into journalistic ethics and the contribution of the media to the contemporary tense climate?
