Ending Explained: Portraits of the Apocalypse
The Buenos Aires Zombie Who Didn’t Know He Was Dead (And Other Highbrow Trash Horrors)
💡 What does the ending really mean?
The climax reveals that the bitter, unemployed porteño protagonist has been dead since the opening scene. The entire film was his oblivious zombie shuffle, mechanically repeating his daily grind as Buenos Aires collapses around him. In the end, he finally confronts his rotting face in a shattered mirror, accepts his condition without fuss, and joins the shambling horde marching down Avenida Corrientes. Loreti’s ending is a savage, tragicomic gut punch: the true apocalypse is not external but the banal, bureaucratic death-in-life of the average Argentine, a nation of internal zombies who keep queuing, paying debts, and bitching about the bus even while putrefying from the inside. The horror is existential, mundane, and bitterly funny.
