Netflix’s 100% Rotten Tomatoes Horror Traps You Inside

Disappear Completely premiered at Austin’s Fantastic Fest in 2022 and arrived on Netflix in April 2024, where it hit the streamer’s Top 10 in Mexico. Rated 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, Luis Javier Henaine’s psychological horror follows a photojournalist cursed aft

For anyone hoping to lose themselves in a truly unsettling horror experience, Netflix has a rare find: Disappear Completely, a psychological descent built less on jump scares than on something sharper—control, distortion, and the slow panic of losing your own senses.

The movie’s premise lands with a jolt almost immediately. Santiago (Harold Torres) is a photojournalist who sells pictures of crimes and accidents to tabloids. After shooting a gruesome scene featuring a still living. but completely unresponsive politician partly devoured by rats. he becomes the target of a curse. Unbeknownst to him. his camera has captured the presence of a demonic entity that traps him in the same web as the senator (Juan Sahagun) he just photographed.

Then the horror turns personal in a way that lingers. Little by little. Santiago starts to lose all of his five senses—first taking away the normal anchors of daily life. then making the world feel less and less like a place he can navigate. As he races against time to find a cure. the search pulls him from doctors to shamans—and. finally. back to the very demon that has hexed him.

Disappear Completely, directed by Luis Javier Henaine, premiered in 2022 at Austin’s Fantastic Fest and landed on Netflix in April 2024. It reached the streamer’s Top 10 in its native Mexico. but it has struggled to find an audience in other countries where it’s readily available. Its Rotten Tomatoes score is 100%.

That disconnect—strong critical response and Top 10 momentum at home, then a quieter global reception—makes the film feel even more like one of those discoveries you don’t stumble across by accident. It’s a movie built to be felt from the inside.

Santiago isn’t alone in the damage. His girlfriend. Marce (Tete Espinoza). is pregnant with Santiago’s child. hoping to keep the baby and build a happy family. Santiago tells her they are not ready to have a child and pressures her to have an abortion. Their relationship—and the unborn baby Santiago carries with him emotionally even as the curse tightens—ends up essential to how he deals with what’s happening to him.

The curse also isn’t just supernatural spectacle. The film mixes urban atmosphere with folk horror, weaving in witchcraft, superstition, and politics. The cursed senator has been victimized by a political rival. adding a layer where personal and public power bleed into each other. But the story keeps pulling the focus back to Santiago. forcing viewers to confront a terrifying question: what would it feel like to be trapped in the same web as someone whose suffering you helped document?.

In an interview, Henaine talked about building Disappear Completely as an immersive, realistic experience. He described trying to make “a more personal film with more down to earth issues. ” while still balancing witchcraft and folk horror. He also explained that in Mexico. witchcraft is something people take very seriously and he wanted it to feel real—saying he aimed for “this has to look real. this has to feel real. this has to be very realistic.” He described that approach carrying through production design. cinematography. and even references to how people behave in those environments.

He also tied the filming style to what Santiago loses. When reading the script. Henaine said he envisioned “a very immersive filmmaking style. ” one that would make the audience active participants instead of passive observers. He said that when Santiago starts losing his sense of hearing. the film would shift with that change—playing slowly with the whole experience. making it subjective. and putting the audience in the character’s mind.

As Santiago deteriorates, the movie’s final moments make the point in an almost cruelly literal way. When he is losing his sense of hearing. viewers can barely understand the sounds around him. and then. in the blink of an eye. the whole movie goes quiet. His sight follows—images blur until they disappear completely.

That ending resonates with a core idea threaded throughout the film: photography as horror. Disappear Completely presents a kind of fear that would be disturbing no matter who it happened to. But Santiago’s profession sharpens the knife. The movie frames him as someone we’re meant to despise, not just fear. It shows him enjoying the work—creating tasteless titles for the stories that accompany his pictures. trying to sell some of his photos to art galleries. and even seeming to make “high art” out of mangled bodies.

Once he’s cursed, the punishment is brutally ironic. Santiago becomes the subject of his own images—doomed to be captured as the kind of living death he spent years documenting. The film uses that fate to argue that the most frightening loss isn’t only physical or supernatural. It’s the idea that an image—captured, framed, sold, fixed—can trap a person in a single unchangeable moment. It’s hard to watch Santiago’s downfall unfold on screen without thinking about the world outside the theater: smartphones. social media. and privacy that can vanish in an instant.

For a film that runs 106 minutes and arrives with a release date of February 29, 2024 on Netflix, Disappear Completely has an unusual quality. It feels like it’s watching you back—through the lens of what you choose to capture, and what that choice can cost.

And with a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating, the only real question now is whether viewers are willing to “disappear” into it before someone else tells them it’s worth the time.

Disappear Completely Netflix Rotten Tomatoes 100% Luis Javier Henaine psychological horror Harold Torres Juan Sahagun Tete Espinoza Austin's Fantastic Fest folk horror witchcraft