Overview
Throughout the 20th century and beyond, the rooms of an Argentinian house are witness to very different inhabitants and mysteries. Filmmaker Diego Lerman takes the opportunity of a TV series to tell different stories in various artistic styles, collectively portraying the many faces and tribulations of one country.
Seasons
- Status
- Ended
- Seasons
- 1 season
- Episodes
- 13 episodes
- First aired
- Mar 30, 2015
Reviews
3 min readA House That Holds Time
I’ve always been drawn to stories that treat architecture as a character—those quiet, unblinking witnesses to human lives. La casa (2015) is one of those rare series that doesn’t just use a house as a setting but lets it breathe, age, and absorb the weight of the people who pass through it. Over 13 episodes, the same Argentinian home becomes a vessel for different eras, different sorrows, different attempts at connection.
It’s an ambitious premise, and one that could easily have collapsed under its own weight. Instead, it lingers like the echo of footsteps in an empty hallway.
The series’ structure is its most striking feature: each episode (or sometimes a pair of them) introduces a new set of characters, a new decade, a new artistic style. One story might unfold in the stark, high-contrast black-and-white of a 1940s melodrama; the next could feel like a gritty, handheld vérité piece from the 1980s. The house remains the constant, its walls absorbing the aesthetic shifts like layers of paint.
It’s a bold choice, and one that risks leaving the viewer adrift—after all, television thrives on the slow burn of character development, the comfort of returning to familiar faces. But La casa isn’t interested in comfort. It’s interested in the way time erodes, the way lives overlap without ever quite touching, and the way a place can hold more history than the people who live in it.
Audience Opinions
"A moody Argentine mini-series centered on a house with a dark past, best for drama viewers who like scandalous, disturbing stories unfolding over years."
Created by Diego Lerman and featuring Maria Merlino, Erica Rivas, Luis Ziembrowski and Diego Velazquez, La casa follows an Argentine house across years as scandalous and disturbing events play out inside it. The hook is the house itself and the weight of its past, latestnetflix.com contends, so it plays as atmospheric drama with a dark edge rather than light entertainment.
- House-centered premise An Argentine house with a dark past anchors events across years, giving the drama a contained, atmospheric focus.
- Dark tone The emphasis on scandalous and disturbing events makes for uncomfortable viewing rather than easy drama.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsA well under the kitchen, then thirteen decades
Diego Lerman was renovating a house from 1900 when a builder opened the floor and found a huge well under the kitchen, almost a room packed with antique objects. That hole, he told Pagina/12 on premiere night, made him think of the stories already inscribed in the walls of any home. 
He turned the thought into La casa. latestnetflix.com's take is that Thirteen self-contained hours in one mansion on the Tigre delta.Each chapter a different decade from 1929 to 2029. TV Publica put the first one on at 11 p.m. on 30 March 2015. The last one ran 17 April.
He called it a series of thirteen mid-length films whose real leads were the place and the passing of time, swapping genre, register, and cast every week. Campo Cine produced it. INCAA and the Ministry of Planning paid for the prime-time slot through a public contest. The whole cycle was shot in 2013, two years before anyone at Canal 7 had to sweat overnight ratings. Mercedes Moran, who plays a mystic returning to the house in the 2020 chapter, liked that the scripts were closed. No rewrite after a bad night.
Gardel slept here. So did a kidnapping, and a virus that had not happened yet.
Episode two parks Carlos Gardel in the house the night before the Colombia tour that kills him. A tuberculosis boss holds an eight-year-old heiress in 1952. She walks back in as an old woman in 2012, played by Mirta Busnelli. Vera Spinetta's philosophy students try a threesome with the maid in 1967. Julieta Diaz's militant mother stages an operation during the 1978 dictatorship. Carapintada deserters loop through time in 1987. The closer, with Erica Rivas, parks a pregnant couple in 2029 during a lethal pandemic, a plot Lerman locked before anyone used the word lockdown. He and Mara Pescio wrote every episode with a rotating third writer. Fernando Zuber directed two.
Paris sales shop Loco Films picked the series up in May 2015. Laurent Danielou told Variety it was the first series of that scale to come out of Latin America. 
Series Mania programmed it that April, a first for an Argentine director at the Forum des Images. IFFR 2016 put four chapters, including "Secuestro," "Revolucionarios," "Ficcion," and "Virus," into a new TV section and called the show a bold oddity on a traditional Argentine schedule. TV Publica's own page still lists Series Mania, Cannes' Marche du Film, and Rotterdam. Netflix dropped the English export title The House of Dark Secrets into catalogs in July 2022, seven years after Canal 7 and nine after the well. The IFFR trailer still sells the pitch in one breath. Thirteen decades. Thirteen stories. One house.
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.