The Follies Review
Director: Rodrigo García
Date Created: 2025-11-21 03:11
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The Follies Review: Written and helmed by Rodrigo García, Las Locuras holds together a powerhouse cast starring Cassandra Ciangherotti, Ángeles Cruz, Ilse Salas, Fernanda Castillo, Adriana Barraza, and others. This 121-minute Netflix movie plunges you into the orbit of six women whose lives unravel and criss-cross over one chaotic, unpredictable day. With stories presented in an anthology format, all the tales inflating one another almost imperceptibly, it creates a mosaic narrative of emotional meltdown, social conformity, and personal empowerment.
The Follies Review
Netflix’s The Follies set the tone for a drama that values emotional truth above plot-driven suspense. García’s direction has emphasised intimate, layered portraits of women working out private struggles and breaking points while the world around them is largely in the dark. Each of them carries a particular weight — fear, resentment, longing, confusion or exhaustion — and nothing happens for a while in “Envious” except to take its time showing how those feelings might be influencing their choices at various moments during the course of the day.
The acting is reserved and natural, hence giving consistency to the various chapters of this anthology. These characters seldom meet each other, if at all, and far from directly. Never straining for hyperbole, the silences, hesitation, and restrained reactions speak volumes louder than the lines do. Thus, Netflix’s film The Follies keeps the emotional intensity consistent, often lingering well into the next scene.
But despite the distinctiveness of each woman’s crisis, there is a common theme running through all their experiences: The tension between what they feel inside and how society says they should act. The film captures smartly the burden of unexpressed emotions — especially those women in society who were encouraged to stuff or rationalise out of existence. Rather than prettifying this, the Mexican movie The Follies demonstrates how each prosaic incident — an argument, a passing stranger, the company of family — can drive you to further unravelling.
Fear of what others think, wanting power, the desire for connection and the need to survive: These are the themes throughout. It’s in these repetitions of the motif that the anthology functions as a unified whole rather than a fractured one, despite the lack of direct correlations within the plot connecting these characters.
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The structure of Netflix’s Mexican movie The Follies allows the audience to tend to each storyline as almost an intimate short unto itself. Each woman is given time for her experience to breathe, without rushing into an imposed resolution. The one-day timeline is emotionally and psychologically fraught for each of the six characters from their first moments on stage.
This format is effective at bringing out individual stories and struggles without making any moralistic judgment, but the pacing is slow by design, which could make it feel ponderous to audiences more used to speedier storytelling. Some parts feel fully rendered and emotionally sandpapered; others seem more like peeks at succinct moments of emergency, offering a view but not leading to resolution. If that’s a fault, or simply a stylistic choice, question of what you’re looking for in an anthology piece.
The tone in Netflix’s The Follies is heavy but never manipulative. All the characters are written to have real flaws, not dramatic extremes. It pays close attention to that kind of emotional experience that often goes overlooked: an unexpected trigger, unresolved past, some feeling that refuses to be controlled, or the one where the tension carried for so long finally rises to the surface.
Some scenes might be a little discomforting, because that’s how true emotional turmoil can be. The movie isn’t afraid of those tensions, then, but it shows how frustration, fear or vulnerability might erupt when one simply “can’t” anymore. For those who particularly like thoughtful, character-based storytelling, that is what makes the Netflix movie The Follies so appealing.
Despite the megawatt ensemble and tapestry of interconnected stories, The Follies focuses far more on change that is internal than it is external to the plot. There are conflicts, but not of plot; rather, they are philosophical and emotional. That’s why, perhaps surprisingly, the film is a bit unlike so many of Netflix’s other (and mostly traumatic) dramas, in that it veers more toward introspection — sometimes outright discomfort — when it ponders what it means for the inner world of a human to no longer fit within society’s walls.
It’s not for everyone, nor does it aim to be; its dedication to emotional realism means that its appeal is most likely to be found with the subset of viewers who enjoy slow burns, provided there’s depth in their psychological component and realistic character work. It does one useful thing: It makes you feel for figures who are not always likeable, cool or conventionally composed — and I think that challenge is part of what it’s after artistically.
Netflix The Follies Review: Summing Up
The whole movie operates on honesty rather than spectacle. The tales were raw and unfiltered thanks to García’s direction, and the ensemble included work by the stellar cast members. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, because it’s slow and atmospheric, but for anyone who adores contemporary drama about the frail edges of human nature, here’s a movie you’ve been looking for.
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