General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

42 Days of Darkness

42 Days of Darkness (42 días en la oscuridad) is a 2022 Chilean crime drama miniseries, the first Chilean original series produced by Netflix, inspired by the 2010 disappearance and murder of Viviana Haeger in Puerto Varas¹. It premiered on May 11, 2022 with six episodes, directed by Claudia Huaiquimilla and Gaspar Antillo and produced by Fábula, the production company of the filmmakers Pablo and Juan de Dios Larraín¹^•². The plot follows Cecilia Montes (Claudia Di Girolamo), who leads a desperate search for her missing sister Verónica (Aline Küppenheim) while fighting police negligence, media harassment, and social prejudice³.

Key fact	Detail
Premiere	May 11, 2022, on Netflix; six episodes released at once¹
Status	First Chilean original series produced by Netflix¹
Directors	Claudia Huaiquimilla and Gaspar Antillo²
Production	Fábula, the company of Pablo and Juan de Dios Larraín⁴
Source material	Inspired by the Viviana Haeger case and based on Rodrigo Fluxá's book Usted sabe quién: Notas sobre el homicidio de Viviana Haeger (Catalonia, 2019)⁵
Main cast	Claudia Di Girolamo, Aline Küppenheim, Pablo Macaya, Daniel Alcaíno, Néstor Cantillana, Amparo Noguera, Gloria Münchmeyer¹^•⁶
Filming locations	Villarrica, Pucón, Puerto Montt, and Santiago⁷

Spoilers

Plot and characters

The series opens on the morning of June 29, 2010, when Verónica Montes disappears from her home in the Altos del Lago condominium in southern Chile after failing to pick up her older daughter from school⁸^•⁹. Her husband Mario Medina (Daniel Alcaíno) says he received a call that morning demanding money for her release; his calm demeanor strikes some, including Verónica's family, as suspicious⁹.

The search is driven mainly by Cecilia, Verónica's sister, supported by her husband Arturo Fernández (Daniel Muñoz) and Víctor Pizarro (Pablo Macaya), a lawyer turned private investigator who has fallen on hard times⁹. The story counts the days from the disappearance, weaving the public dimensions of the case, including police ineptitude, judicial inertia, and class bias, with the private lives of the characters¹⁰.

The real case

The series draws on the case of Viviana Haeger, an accountant who disappeared on June 29, 2010 from a private neighborhood of Puerto Varas, in southern Chile, and whose body was found 42 days later hidden in the attic of her own house⁵^•¹¹. The case generated wide public attention in Chile, both for its outcome and for the unanswered questions around it, including errors in the police investigation and the suspected involvement of the victim's husband¹².

The judicial process closed seven years after the crime, when José Pérez Mancilla was sentenced to ten years in prison for robbery with homicide¹³. In the real trial, the central figures were Jaime Anguita Medel, Haeger's widower, and José Pérez Mancilla, a worker of Anguita's, along with the victim's mother Delia Massé and her sisters Ingrid and Mónica Haeger¹⁴.

From book to series

The project began with the journalist Rodrigo Fluxá, who covered the case for four years, reviewed nearly 5,000 pages of the case file, listened to 3,249 legally intercepted phone calls, and covered the full trial in Puerto Montt¹⁵. His book Usted sabe quién: Notas sobre el homicidio de Viviana Haeger was published in 2019 and became the basis for the series, on whose script Fluxá worked alongside Huaiquimilla and Enrique Videla⁵^•⁹.

The makers describe the series as inspired by, not based on, the Haeger case: character names were changed, fictional characters were added, and some events were altered¹³^•⁹. Director Claudia Huaiquimilla, the Chilean filmmaker behind Mala Junta and Mis hermanos sueñan despiertos, said the team chose not to document an absolute truth but to pursue a broader reflection⁸. Among the adjustments, the fictional daughter Karen has no boyfriend and is in Chile with her younger sister when her father is arrested, and the story's weight falls on the sister and the lawyer rather than on the widower, as in the real trial¹⁶^•¹⁴.

Family criticism and reception

In April 2021, a week after Netflix announced the series, Vivian and Susan Anguita, the two daughters of Viviana Haeger, published a letter in the newspaper El Llanquihue objecting that no one from the production had contacted them beforehand⁸. "Our story is already quite public, but it is still ours," they wrote, asking that the production remember that real lives lay behind the story¹⁷. La Tercera reported that Mónica Haeger, the victim's sister, had in fact been informed of the project before its official announcement, though she did not read the scripts⁸. After the premiere, Huaiquimilla said the team empathized with the family's pain and had sought to treat the subject with care¹.

Audience response was strong. The day after its premiere the series became the most-watched series in Chile, and it reached seventh place among the most-watched non-English-language series, accumulating 9.9 million hours of viewing¹⁷. Netflix reported that it stayed several weeks among the ten most-watched series in Chile⁹. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.5 out of 10 from about 2,000 votes¹⁸. Critics noted the cold, rainy southern landscapes as a character in itself, filmed in Villarrica, Pucón, and Puerto Montt, and praised the ensemble cast, while some found genre indecision between drama and police procedural¹⁰^•¹³. The series won four awards and received seven nominations in total¹⁸, including Best Social and Political Series at the 2022 PRODU Awards⁷.

Significance for Chilean television

As the first Chilean original for Netflix, the series marked a milestone for the local television industry and for Fábula, which had previously produced the streaming series El Presidente and La Jauría¹³. Reviewers placed it above those earlier Fábula productions in script quality, and its success returned Fluxá's book to the bestseller lists¹³^•¹⁹. The series also entered a wider pattern in which Netflix and Amazon Prime Video chose Chilean originals tied directly to national reality, recent criminal cases covered heavily by the press, and worked almost exclusively with Fábula as a local production partner²⁰.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026