Pablo Trapero's 'Gordon' Brings Argentina's Dirty War Torturer to Netflix

"Gordon" hits Netflix on Nov. 18 as a seven-part psychological action thriller, marking Pablo Trapero's first project in his native Argentina in eight years. He co-directed with Pablo Fendrik, and the pair shot across seven months with what Variety describes as large cinematographic ambition. Rodrigo de la Serna, best known for "Money Heist," leads as the title character.

The series covers 1970 to 1976 and centers on the real Ánibal Gordon, described as a torturer, psychopath and connoisseur of violence. He joined Argentina's military intelligence as a secret agent in 1968, rose through the pre-Junta Triple A death squads, and from May to November 1976 ran Automotores Orletti, one of the regime's most brutal detention and torture sites. Through him the show tunnels into Argentina's Dirty War of 1974-83.

Trapero told Variety the aim was to start from fiction with real events as context, calling Gordon a "sci-fi portal" into the country's competing universes of the era. The genre shifts episode by episode: the opener plays like a Western about a stranger carving out space, the second like a secret-agent investigative thriller, and the finale edges toward horror. Trapero wrote the series with Marcos Osorio Vidal, adapting Marcelo Larraquy's novel.

De la Serna framed Gordon as the only figure in the story without an ideology or doctrine, operating in a Cold War where Peronism pitched itself as a third way between capitalism and Marxism. He called Gordon a mercenary chasing money and the pleasure of his own psychopathic essence, and said the national and international climate let psychopaths of his scale grab power and drop their masks. Trapero added that violence itself became a commodity in those years.

Adrián Suar, a longtime force in Argentine film and TV, produces with Diego Andraznik through their new outfit Preludio Producciones. Trapero tied "Gordon" back to 2016's "The Clan," his Venice best-director Silver Lion winner about the murderous Puccio family, which grossed $20.4 million worldwide. He described the new series as a kind of revenge, returning to that period and its noir-melodrama blend with far more room for the story.