For some time now, Multivisión hosts at least two moments of the day what has been called youth series. Invariably from a foreign invoice. Almost always interpreted by adolescents or individuals in their early youth, even when the subject exceeds the interests of the age group.
I ignore the impact of such productions (data on audience, reception and taste) on Cuban adolescents and young people. The last one, in 2022, before Welcome to Eden broke out, worked equally for young people and older adults. The sagas in which mystery, intrigue and paranormal phenomena reign have a safe public, in which those who digest everything that comes their way coexist with those who do not let the cat for a poke pass.
It would be necessary to see the reaction of one and the other after attending the television projection of the eight chapters of the series Tierra incognita. Interesting fact: under the Disney corporate seal, the production is Argentine and its plot takes place in the southern nation. In an imaginary town, Cabo Qwert –a place name copied from the upper row of letters on conventional keyboards–, with a slight Borgesian air.
What happens when the young Eric Dalara receives an enigmatic note and decides to return to town to find out the true fate of his parents who had disappeared eight years ago, in the amusement park founded by them named Tierra incógnita, unleashes a chain of actions of his own. of the genre.
Eric (Pablo Maurizi) drags the whole family along – the younger sister Uma (Mora Fisz), mute by the trauma of having seen, without understanding, what happened to her parents; the denier grandfather and the forgiving grandmother; and an aunt (the well-balanced actress Carmen Pandolfi)– to unravel the mystery, amid the hostility of the locals, encouraged by the local police chief (a stereotypical Lautaro Delgado) who is known from the outset to be He is a bad amount, just like his little son Axel (Tomás Kirzner), the main enemy of the Dalara brothers.
Originality is not the central virtue of Tierra incógnita. Too much has happened in the series that address the theme to ignore the influences and nods to Stranger Things, It, Grimm and others like that, without taking into account that the author of the plot -later developed by a trio of scriptwriters-, Tomás Wortley is considered in Argentina as one of the most stubborn promoters of the legacy of the American Horace P. Lovecraft, one of the most delirious authors of supernatural horror stories of literary modernity. It is not for nothing that some twins appear who swing and speak in unison; the figure of the uroboros, a snake that bites its tail, here closer to the use of alchemy than to the mythical Egyptian representation; and the terrifying creature that zombifies humans within range.
Gratuitous and counterproductive, however, it was the staging of the monster’s past in a community of ancient original settlers, folklorized in the worst possible way.
The direction of Sebastián Pivotto, an experienced director of productions for the entertainment industry, revealed his trade due to his narrative fluidity, so that Tierra incógnita aroused interest beyond the clichés, the debts with other series and the awkward oscillations between rationality and the fantasy.