The quadruple femicide he committed in 1992 made him a popular culture character. Now Prime Video premieres a fiction that promises to move the needle: not the dentist, but the four women he murdered.
The case had already been a book, a miniseries and even merchandising. Now it is a Prime Video film, and the declared bet is different from everything before: to tell the quadruple femicide that Ricardo Barreda committed on November 15, 1992 in his home in La Plata from the perspective of his wife, his mother-in-law and his two daughters, the four women he murdered that night.
Luis Machín plays the dentist in «Barreda», the title of the film directed by Daniela Goggi, the same filmmaker behind «El Rapto», starring Rodrigo de la Serna. For the four victims, the production added Mercedes Morán, Carla Peterson, Maite Lanata and Margarita Páez, while the rest of the cast includes Marcelo Subiotto, Paola Barrientos and Alberto Ajaka. The premiere is confirmed for August 28 on Prime Video, in a co-production between About Entertainment, Armando Bo’s production company, and Infinity Hill together with Amazon MGM Studios.
The choice to focus the story on the victims is not a minor detail if we review what happened after the crime. Barreda confessed to having killed the four women and alleged that they humiliated him by calling him «Conchita.» That nickname ended up defining a good part of how Argentina processed the case: he received more than 600 letters of support in prison and merchandise was sold with his name, from mugs to T-shirts. Femicide became folklore before anyone wondered too much about Marcela, Cristina, Emma or Guillermina.
Can a fiction move the axis after three decades of a story built almost exclusively around the femicide? It is the question that hovers over any new adaptation of the case, especially when the base material—books, chronicles, prison interviews—comes mostly from that same logic that turned Barreda into a character rather than a perpetrator.
Because the case was not missing from the police chronicle or literature. Rodolfo Palacios wrote «Conchita: the man who did not love women» (2012) based on visits to Barreda himself after his house arrest. He is also portrayed in «We are not angels» (2007), by Florencia Etcheves, Mauro Szeta and Liliana Caruso, and in the anthology «Buenos Aires is legend III», where he is directly described as a «figure of popular culture.» The most recent adaptation had been the documentary miniseries «Barreda, the femicidal odontologist», released in September 2025, with interviews with journalists and the communicator specializing in gender Mariana Carbajal.
That the new production decides to install the point of view of the murdered women—and not again that of the dentist who became a meme—is, in the best of cases, an attempt to correct three decades of story. At worst, he runs the risk of adding another chapter to the saga of fiction about a case that, with or without intention, never stopped revolving around him.
