The Meltdown

Chile, 1992: in the snowy Andes, nine-year-old Inés spends her holidays at her grandparents’ hotel, where they are busier with their guests than with the lonely child. Only Hanna, a young German skier, becomes a confidante. But Hanna vanishes without a trace. And so the wintry idyll turns into a labyrinth of insinuation and silence. When Hanna’s mother Lina (Saskia Rosendahl) then arrives too, accusations suddenly fill the air that pose the question of guilt entirely anew.

In her widely noted debut “1976” (shown at 14 Films in 2022), director Manuela Martelli already told of the invisible traces of the Pinochet dictatorship. With “The Meltdown”, which had its world premiere at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section, she continues this work on a nation’s memory. The camera stays close to Inés throughout, to her curious gaze and her childlike sense that the adults are hiding something. The wide snowscapes and empty hotel corridors become images of a society that wants to cover up its history. And Saskia Rosendahl lends the despair of Hanna’s mother a quiet, unsettling presence. But Martelli does not turn her film into a conventional missing-person thriller; she makes it a cool, disconcerting initiation drama: about the end of childhood and about a fragile, uncertain democracy in which the great thaw is still to come.