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A smart, unusually textured political drama that turns a referendum campaign into a study of image-making, persuasion, and democratic pressure. Its analog-video look gives the period a lived-in immediacy, and the film stays sharp by treating advertising as both a weapon and a moral compromise.
Where to watch: Buy
Thu · 1h 58m
Director: Pablo Larraín
Starring: Gael García Bernal, Alfredo Castro, Néstor Cantillana
In 1988, Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet, due to international pressure, is forced to call a plebiscite on his presidency. The country will vote ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to Pinochet extending his rule for another eight years. Opposition leaders for the ‘No’ vote persuade a brash young advertising executive, René Saavedra, to spearhead their campaign. Against all odds, with scant resources and while under scrutiny by the despot’s minions, Saavedra and his team devise an audacious plan to win the election and set Chile free.
Pablo Larraín
Gael García Bernal, Alfredo Castro, Néstor Cantillana
A smart, unusually textured political drama that turns a referendum campaign into a study of image-making, persuasion, and democratic pressure. Its analog-video look gives the period a lived-in immediacy, and the film stays sharp by treating advertising as both a weapon and a moral compromise.
No is one of those political films that understands how power really moves: through messaging, repetition, and the ability to shape what people feel before they fully know what they think. Rather than dramatizing history as a grand uprising, it focuses on the mechanics of persuasion, which makes the stakes feel both specific and universal.
Pablo Larraín’s use of period video is more than a stylistic flourish. The grainy, boxy image collapses the distance between archive and fiction, making the campaign feel like something captured in real time rather than reconstructed later. That choice also sharpens the film’s central tension: can a democracy be won with the tools of advertising, or does that strategy dilute the very cause it serves?
What keeps the film compelling is its refusal to simplify its protagonist or its politics. It is funny, uneasy, and observant about compromise, and it finds drama in the friction between moral urgency and market-tested optimism. The result is a political story that feels both historically grounded and eerily current.
Lise (4★) · 648 likes
Imagine. Here you are, a Chilean, and for the very first time in decades you are given the opportunity to speak freely about Pinochet's atrocities. Without reprisals. Not just that, but you can do it on television. Not just that, but you can do it every day for 15 minutes for 27 days. Finally you can let other Chileans know exactly what those atrocities were. You can let the world know. Finally the world will know about the disappeared, the… more
Dom (3★) · 396 likes
I watched this with my girlfriend. At one point she said she wanted to marry Gael Garcia Bernal but also raise him as her child.
Muriel (5★) · 336 likes
completely mesmerized by everything from this, specifically gael garcía bernal mi marxista vende patria. them advertising the "no" with the rainbow and jane fonda was very gay.
Harrison Gale (5★) · 289 likes
graphic design literally saved Chile
Juan Castillo (4.5★) · 231 likes
Admirable trabajo de Pablo Larraín, que puede considerarse un triunfo en todos los aspectos: formales, narrativos, dramáticos, conceptuales... La filmación en vídeo analógico, el formato 4:3, los hábiles insertos de material de archivo y la solvencia del elenco aportan una altísima verosimilitud a la cinta, mientras que los sutiles acercamientos a los tropos del thriller político o del drama histórico generan implicación en el espectador sin apelar a la sensiblería o a la hipérbole. Por si esto no fuese suficiente
A foundational portrait of political struggle in Chile, ideal for viewers interested in the country’s modern history and the pressures that precede democratic rupture.
Shares the atmosphere of authoritarian surveillance and the quiet mechanics of resistance, with a similarly tense, human-scale political focus.
A gripping investigation into state violence and disappearance, pairing political urgency with intimate emotional stakes.
A classic of political cinema about repression, public truth, and the machinery of state power.
For viewers drawn to process-driven storytelling about institutions, evidence, and the slow work of changing public perception.
Another film about media, public responsibility, and the risks of speaking out under political pressure.
A sharp study of institutional pressure and the cost of exposing truth, with strong overlap in procedural tension.
Costa-Gavras’s political thriller about repression and insurgency offers a taut, morally urgent companion piece.
A visually elegant political drama about complicity, ideology, and the seductions of fitting into power structures.
A smart, cynical look at campaign messaging and image management that pairs well with the film’s advertising angle.
For the satirical side of political image-making and the uneasy relationship between spectacle and truth.
A witty, cynical exploration of persuasion as a craft, useful for viewers who enjoyed the campaign’s strategic mindset.
anti-dictatorship resistance, democratic transition, political campaigning, media manipulation, advertising and persuasion, moral compromise, historical memory, state repression
political drama, historical drama, Latin American cinema, anti-authoritarian, campaign strategy, media satire, 1980s, analog video, democracy, thriller-adjacent