Four years after Augusto Pinochet was voted out of office by the Chilean people in 1988, and two years after democracy was formally restored to the country for the first time in decades, Chile opened its booth at the Universal Exposition of Seville by dramatically unveiling an iceberg that had been carved out of Antarctica and shipped halfway across the world. The industrialized gesture was meant to symbolize Chile’s hard-won modernity, and — perhaps — that Pinochet’s reign of terror was about to thaw into a warm and prosperous new age.
Manuela Martelli’s “The Meltdown,” which opens with grainy camcorder footage of that same iceberg being scooped from the sea, offers a much darker take on the display in Seville (as you might be able to glean from the sawing violins and skittering cymbals that make up Mariá Portugal’s discordant score). Equal parts “The Spirit of the Beehive” and “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” this unnerving thriller frames the iceberg as less of a claim to the future than a disavowal of the past — as the self-damning fantasy of a nation that wanted nothing more than to separate its newly emergent tip from the dark and unmovable mass of history that continued to lurk just under the surface. That pearly white chunk of frozen water would start to sweat apart before it even got to Spain, of course; by the time the expo was over, only the main body of the iceberg would remain. Invisible to the naked eye but hard as a fact.
Martelli’s first movie, “Chile ’76,” was a thriller that dismantled the illusion of not taking sides at the height of an authoritarian takeover. More probing, if also somewhat less assured of its perspective, her tense 1992-set follow-up is a similarly tense rebuke to such magical thinking, in this case the notion that a certain amount of collective forgetting is required for a post-fascist country to make way for tomorrow.
Aligning its point-of-view to that of a nine-year-old girl named Inés (a watchful and compellingly uncertain Maya O’Rourke), “The Meltdown” broaches its subject with a skeptical naivete that makes even the most benign adults feel like they’re all involved in the same conspiracy. In a sense, perhaps they are. But Inés doesn’t know enough to ask how the pieces might fit together, and the situation becomes a lot more confusing for her after her new friend Hanna — a 15-year-old German ski prodigy who follows the snow around the globe all year long — suddenly disappears from the remote Andean resort owned by Inés’ grandparents.
Inés has been raised in a world of strange ellipses, and hardly bats an eye when the hotel bartender goes quiet after someone mentions his missing brother, but Hanna (Maia Rae Domagala) is a different story. Inés knew her. What’s more, Inés is one of the last people who saw her before she vanished. That would seem to be a valuable piece of information, but the young girl’s hyper-capitalistic grandmother — obsessed with expanding the resort to accommodate foreign tourists — demands that Inés keep it to herself, lest the authorities start asking questions about Inés’ horny teenage cousin Sebastián (Lautaro Cantillana).
He’s not the only suspect, as Hanna’s fiercely overbearing coach Alexander (Jakub Gierszal) seems capable of crossing a few different lines, but we get the sense that most of the people at the hotel would prefer the mystery to remain unsolved. After decades of death and devastation the Chilean people have been rewarded with a future worth investing in, and the likes of Inés’ grandma will be damned if they’ll let another disappearance get in the way of that. (Her feelings about the country’s former dictator are never discussed, par for the course in a movie that refuses to mention the past by name, or even to explicitly acknowledge that it happened.) Inés doesn’t question that logic, even if her eyes often seem to be searching for the answers that she’s too afraid to ask for, but her silence will soon be tested — if not outright tortured — by the arrival of Hanna’s wild-eyed mother (Saska Rosendahl as Lina, a former East German figure skating champion), who’s rather motivated to solve the mystery.
Martelli’s decision to view this story from a child’s POV allows “The Meltdown” to entertain the possibility of an ahistorical future — of a world in which the children of today are imagined as a chance to forget rather than an imperative to remember. And the film’s snow globe-like setting helps to seduce Inés towards that hermetically sealed innocence. The powder and the clouds are both an identical shade of white, the earth and sky blending together so perfectly that it seems impossible to imagine that anything exists beyond what the eye can see, even though the recent influx of Europeans help to stress that Chile has never existed in a bubble. (New characters often materialize through the fog, while Inés’ absent parents, who it’s suggested are in Seville to report on the expo, might as well be in another dimension.)
That opacity serves a clear purpose, but Martelli is enamored by it to a fault, and Inés’ refusal to question the people around her or make any significant decisions beyond keeping her mouth shut eventually proves more trying than helpful. It’s true that kids tend not to second-guess their realities, but it’s also true that they stress test them all the time, often to the point of great frustration, and “The Meltdown” increasingly has to scramble — or sideline Inés altogether — in order to keep things stressful enough to justify her observant silence.
That approach is sneakily effective in spots, especially as it expresses itself through the tenuous friendship that forms between Inés and Lina (a daughter in need of a mom makes a natural ally for a mom in need of a daughter), but the girl’s reluctance to challenge the status quo has a chilling effect on the movie’s forward momentum, and also grants Martelli permission to let most of her adult characters remain passive in their desire to sweep the past under the rug. Sinister as that can be in its own right, it leaves “The Meltdown” with little to do but ponder its own evasiveness, as the story’s underlying mystery — quoth: “What do we do with the things we don’t think about, but are still there?” — is ultimately left to solve itself.
The past never goes away, of course, it just gets covered up, and sometimes not even all that well. When Inés tells Hanna about her dad, the German girl responds that he’s “from a country that doesn’t exist anymore.” If only the rest of the people in Inés’ life could say the same about themselves.
Grade: B-
“The Meltdown” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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