Director: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia
Billionaires start dropping first. "Rich Flu" (2024) builds its entire premise on a disease that hunts wealth rather than weakness.
What is Rich Flu about?
A mysterious illness begins claiming lives at the very top of the economic ladder, working through billionaires, then multi-millionaires, then anyone still holding a comfortable fortune. As the pattern becomes undeniable, panic spreads faster than any cure, and people scramble to offload assets, property, and investments before the disease can catch up to their tax bracket. The film follows a handful of characters navigating the collapse from different rungs of that ladder, watching how quickly loyalty, family, and self-preservation reshuffle once money itself becomes a liability instead of a safety net. Rather than framing the outbreak as a straightforward horror story, the film uses it as a pressure test on how people behave when the thing they built their lives around suddenly marks them for death.
Cast & crew
Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Rafe Spall anchor the ensemble as characters forced to reckon with sudden, life-threatening wealth, while Lorraine Bracco and Timothy Spall add weight to the film's older, more entrenched perspectives on money and mortality. Jonah Hauer-King and César Domboy round out a cast spread across the story's different social tiers. Director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, known for tightly constructed premise-driven thrillers, keeps the focus on the social mechanics of the outbreak rather than gore or spectacle.
Context & significance
"Rich Flu" is a 2024 thriller from Spanish and Chilean production, directed by Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, whose earlier work built a reputation for high-concept scenarios that double as social commentary. The film's central idea — an illness that specifically targets the wealthy — arrives as a pointed, almost satirical twist on outbreak-thriller conventions, using the format to ask uncomfortable questions about who actually gets protected when disaster strikes.
Where & how to watch
"Rich Flu" is available on K-Time with both a Farsi dub and Persian subtitles alongside its original audio, giving Persian-speaking viewers a smooth way into the film. This page can be read by anyone; watching the film itself only requires logging into a free K-Time account, and the platform's full interface runs in Farsi for the Iranian diaspora.