The new Netflix series I’m Not Afraid takes place during the 1986 World Cup, which Mexico hosted, but from the perspective of kids in a struggling village in Veracruz. Families and kids keep disappearing, and one of the kids in the village finds out that things there aren’t what they seem.
Opening Shot: A boy wakes up on the ground in the woods, after having fallen down. His pants are wet, apparently after peeing himself in fear. “Am I dead?” he asks.
The Gist: Ten-year-old Miguel (Aldo Emiliano Navarro) lives in a village in Veracuz, Mexico. It’s 1986, the year Mexico hosted the World Cup and Argentina’s Diego Maradona was the biggest soccer star on the planet. Miguel lives in a village that used to be thriving, given the yearly coffee harvest that employed dozens and bought in needed resources. But in the past five years, a blight from Colombia has ruined the crops; workers and their families have slowly disappeared.
As Miguel goes to find the friends that are calling him, he finds a piece of wood covering a hole in the ground, he looks down, thinking it’s his friend Chuy (Bruno Strauss), but he sees someone else there, and he’s chained by his ankle to something.
Flash back a few days. Miguel, his sister Maria (Regina Arroyo), Chuy and the remaining kids in the village are playing a pickup game of soccer, when the bully of the group, Calavera (Maura Guzman), kicks the ball in the woods. Calavera’s older brother, Felix (Cosmo Gonzalez), sees that as he’s driving up and tells the group that a witch lives where the ball was kicked; legend has it she eats children who wander into her yard.
Miguel doesn’t believe in witches, but he does get concerned when they go to Chuy’s house and his father Pino (Luis Alberti) is having an argument with Chuy’s parents. Pino seems to have a scheme in mind to make him and his wife Teresa (Fátima Molina) not have to scrape to live and to get Maria the asthma treatments she needs, but Teresa is doubtful.
The next day, Chuy and his family disappear, as if they were abducted or left hastily in the night. Miguel takes it upon himself to investigate, and brings Maria and their friend Chava (Ian Andrade) along with them. It leads them to the burned out house where the witch supposedly lives. They encounter Calavera, and he dares Miguel to go into the house, get the ball, then get oranges from one of the trees. That’s how Miguel pees himself, falls down to the ground, and finds the hole with the kid held captive.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? I’m Not Afraid, based on the novel by Niccolò Ammaniti, has a bit of a Stranger Things feel to it, though the sinister things that are going on are rooted in human behavior.
Our Take: In the middle of the first episode of I’m Not Afraid, the show’s story shifts from 1986 to 1981, to show how Miguel’s village was thriving but was laid waste by a mysterious coffee plant blight that came up from Colombia. In that interim, it seems that the desperation that set in has led the people who remain in the village to do some pretty desperate things.
That’s what Miguel is going to find out as he figures out who is in that hole and how he got there. Despite his relatively small stature, Miguel has proven in this first episode that he’s truly not afraid of bullies like Calavera and doesn’t believe in BS like the kid-eating witch his friends talk about. He’s also not afraid of the kid who is in the hole, so he’ll likely come by and befriend him, while trying to figure out how he got there.
What we hope to see is some time jumps in the storytelling, where we get scenes from the previous five years that reveal just how the people remaining in the village survived after the blight eliminated the coffee plants that determined everyone’s livelihood. But what we also hope to see is Miguel being able to round up the remaining kids, including Calvera, to find out what’s going on, even as the adults in the village scramble around to survive in the face of hardships and the fact that people keep disappearing.
Performance Worth Watching: Aldo Emiliano Navarro does a good job of playing Miguel’s steely determination and the fact that he doesn’t get cowed by things like bullies or scary village folktales.
Sex And Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Felipe (Yago Andreu), the boy in the hole, looks up at Miguel, squinting his eyes because this is the first time in a long time he’s seen daylight.
Sleeper Star: Luis Alberti’s Pino is definitely a dreamer, but we also suspect he might be one of the few adults in the village who isn’t doing something morally wrong.
Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find, though we think using the 1986 World Cup as a backdrop — people watching it in groups on TV, for instance — is an interesting choice that we hope doesn’t get overused.
Our Call: STREAM IT. I’m Not Afraid promises to have a lot of twists and turns, but at its heart its still a coming-of-age story about a group of kids who are going to find out that the adults in their lives aren’t what they seem to be.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.