The Meltdown

eledaisaghost3.0

Pour réconcilier les Allemands LV2 et les Espagnols LV2

davidehrlich3.0

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. ~this review continues on IndieWire~

shookone1.0

having watched nearly the entire Un Certain Regard from Cannes via Hamburg, The Meltdown is the final straw that breaks the camel's back - what a terrible edition 2026 has been. sorry for the hater attitude, but after having watched my personal lowlight of this year, several overhyped films from the section, and a handful of other entries I entirely lost the motivation to find even words for, I start wondering what happened at the Croisette in recent years, that they would curate such an lackluster programme. The Meltdown is the final nail in the coffin: a film trying to create an atmospheric snow thriller setting with mysterious vibes, set at a historical backdrop of the Post Pinochet Chile of the 90s. after giving an introduction pointing towards the political themes of Chilean cinema, our beloved moderator had to backpedal by the end of it, upon request during the Q&A, cause the chronical dimension of this film starts & ends with "girl goes missing", giving you hints of the 'Desaparecidos', the many disappeared victims of the terror regime. maybe Manuela Martellis' film is a good example of subtlety leading to blurry nebulae: if you keep your film so detached from an alleged topic, keeping it so 'mysterious', although it is quite apparently about 'that', it starts to feel pretentious. it certainly doesn't help that the German speaking actors - taking quite a huge space here - don't mash with the rest of the work, the Q&A afterwards offering inside into the production background, and why that might have happened. if a film comes together this disjointed, it's not surprising that the overall feeling is so unfocused, apathetic & foggy.