In the Mud

The Weight of Silence

It is a rare and terrifying thing when a prison drama, a genre so often exhausted by the clatter of bars and the shouting of guards, decides to quiet down. In *In the Mud* (originally *En el barro*), the spiritual successor to Sebastián Ortega’s brutal *El marginal*, the silence is not peaceful; it is heavy, suffocating, and wet. Released in 2025, this Argentine series strips away the testosterone-fueled posturing of its predecessor to reveal something more insidious: a world where survival is not about dominance, but about endurance.

The series opens with a catastrophe that feels biblical in its elemental violence. A prison transport van, carrying five women to the La Quebrada penitentiary, crashes into a river. For a few agonizing minutes, the show lives up to its title. The women are not fighting each other; they are fighting the earth itself.



This opening sequence acts as a baptism by dirt, a visual thesis statement that Ortega and directors Alejandro Ciancio and Estela Cristiani carry through the remaining seven episodes. The camera work here is claustrophobic, often pressing in on the actors’ faces until the edges of the frame blur, mimicking the tunnel vision of trauma. When the survivors finally arrive at La Quebrada, they are not merely inmates; they are "the muddied ones" (*las embarradas*), marked by a shared near-death experience that binds them in a secret sorority of trauma.

Visually, the prison of La Quebrada is a stark contrast to the concrete labyrinth of *El marginal*. It feels organic, almost fungal—a place of decay rather than just confinement. The lighting is often low and sickly, casting long shadows that seem to swallow the characters whole.

The heart of the series lies in the performance of Ana Garibaldi, reprising her role as Gladys "La Borges." In the original series, she was defined by her proximity to powerful men; here, she is untethered, a matriarch without a kingdom. Her performance is a masterclass in physical acting. Watch her eyes in the cafeteria scenes—she is constantly assessing threats, not with the aggression of a predator, but with the weary caution of prey that has survived too many winters. She is joined by Valentina Zenere, whose character brings a brittle, modern energy to the group, representing a younger generation for whom crime is a performance as much as a necessity.



The narrative tension arises not just from the expected turf wars, but from the realization that the system itself is the antagonist. The corruption in La Quebrada is not a bug; it is the operating system. The "mud" of the title becomes a metaphor for the moral compromise required to survive. To stay clean is to die; to survive, one must get dirty.

Ultimately, *In the Mud* succeeds because it refuses to glamorize its violence. There are no slow-motion heroics here, only desperate scrambles for breath. It is a grim, compelling addition to the canon of Latin American noir, suggesting that while men may build the prisons, it is the women who must learn to live in the ruins. It is not an easy watch, but like the mud that coats its protagonists, it is impossible to shake off.