The Bad Family Review: La Mala Familia premiered on Netflix on June 15, 2023 with a runtime of 1 hour 21 minutes. The Spanish documentary has been directed by Nacho A Villar and Luis Rojo, who also wrote the content along with Raul Liarte. Featuring the real life personalities involved in the case, the film particularly addresses how Andres Pizarro’s plight and isolation resulting in alienation upon his incarceration.
The Bad Family Review Does Not Contain Spoilers
La Mala Familia Premise
Situated in Madrid, and centred around Youngblood teenagers Andrés, Nata and the rest of their friend circle self-proclaimed as The Bad Family, this documentary lays the foundation of the group’s testosterone and alcohol fuelled brawl that leads to unprecedented consequences. Andrés is subjected to a year in custody, further leading to a traumatic trial, while many of them struggle to pay off their fines for the same incident. This honest narration comes as a follow-up to the initial premise as all these young men dig into how this changes have impacted their life and friendship.
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The Bad Family Review: Discussion
Naturalistic in approach, the documentary situates them in their neighbourhood, almost as if portaging an extension of their identity. Discussions about race and identity come to the top at some points, but, in the end, most of the duration is surrendered to the men in question laying out their firsthand experience of what being in prison was like for them.
Direct confessions about how the isolation in their cells got the best of them, and Andres even goes on to add in one of his monologues towards the end that it doesn’t matter if your term extends to a year, double digit years or for a lifetime – “conviction is conviction”.
At the first, the storyline is a bit hard to follow as the narrative progress ahead ambiguously, but soon we’re lent visuals of the friends finally reuniting after a long period and sharing how the aftermath has changed their lives. Some of them even have families to look out for now, making it even harder to completely pay off their fines.
In some ways, the movie comes out as one of those homemade videos which are not tampered by a professional hand, rather a more personal story guides the direction as conversation starts circling around the members of The Bad Family. Often, such narratives have been painted as sensationalised plots, but this capturing of a real life event allows the people involved in it to break free of the shackles of marginalisation. They’re made to speak for themselves without the interference of an outsider’s insight in order to succeed at conveying the palpability of these people’s fractured conscience, and sometimes even brittle friendships.
Like many documentaries, this one doesn’t need any direction, and with this fly on the wall tactic, the filmmakers allowed this friend group to reunite in a realistic setting without laying down any instruction, making room for them to vent out all they wanted to. As much as the whole thing speaks for the judicial system too, the focus is more on their respective subjective takeaways of the incident. Again, the movie finds no kind of fabrication intervening these interactions. The conversation that further unfolded in this manner made each of the friends realise that neither of them knew what the other was going through presently.
Grounded talks about how paying for their fines was becoming nearly impossible, and in that it does feel that La Mala Familia was fed with certain themes to dig deeper into beforehand. However, after that, the sense of loss and alienation that is grasped from their conversations, comes straight from their heart and has nothing to do with the makers. As a result, the docufilm offers these people a sort of coping mechanism to deal with their loss and further voice out their alienation and let go of the ghosts of the past.
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