– CANNES 2026: Manuella Martelli crafts a subtle, atmospheric and allusive work about a mysterious disappearance in a hotel in the mountains
Maia Rae Domagala and Maya O’Rourke in The Meltdown
“You don’t know anything, I don’t know anything, no-one knows anything.” Is this a simple observation vis-à-vis a nebulous situation or an implicit warning in the form of advice given to a child by an adult? By way of her second feature film, The Meltdown, presented in the Un Certain Regard section of the 79th Cannes Film Festival, Manuella Martelli (revealed in the 2022 Directors’ Fortnight via Chile ‘76) half-opens a door to a land with blurred outlines, made hazier still by the snow invading its décor and the steam covering its windows (“as if the world had been erased”). A place where you risk getting trapped in the fog or tumbling off a ledge en route to a volcano. It’s a film harbouring multiple mysteries and open to all kinds of interpretations (primarily of a metaphorical nature around the ongoing need for an “inventory” of the military dictatorship’s actions), which the Chilean filmmaker fully explores from the perspective of a nine-year-old girl.
“It’s a really strange place”. When her parents – who’ve set off for the Universal Exhibition of Seville in 1992 (where the Chilean pavilion is exhibiting an iceberg) – leave her with her grandparents who own an opulent hotel hidden away in the mountains, little Inès (Maya O’Rourke) is free to roam the premises to her heart’s content. Lovingly protected by the hotel staff, she watches, listens, roots around in customers’ rooms, haunts the corridors, worms her way into sleeping here and there, and gets closer to Hanna (Maia Rae Domagala), a 14-year-old German skier who’s travelled to the mountains with her coach (Jakub Gierszal) and a training team. But one night, the young sportswoman mysteriously vanishes. The search begins, and Inès knows something that her grandmother (Paulina Urrutia) urges her to hide. It’s not long before Hanna’s former-ice-skating-star-mother, Lina (Saskia Rosendahl), arrives from the GDR, “a country which no longer exists”…
Driving the story forwards slalom-style, gliding or rebounding from one gate to the next, Manuella Martelli (who wrote the film’s highly sophisticated, tangled web of a screenplay) delivers a pseudo investigation with a variety of leads, entangling financial interests, convenient lies, unspeakable echoes of the past, ambiguous feelings and snippets of everyday life in the hotel. Navigating on the hazy border between different genres in a wintery atmosphere with depressive undertones, all brilliantly depicted by director of photography Benjamín Echazarreta, The Meltdown is an evocative, incredibly rich and cinematographically refined work which will appeal to anyone who likes to read what they please (without having everything explained to them) and adventurers who like to lose themselves.
The Meltdown was produced by Chilean firms Ronda Cine and Wood Producciones alongside US outfit Cinema Inutile, in co-production with Elastica Films (Spain), Piano (Mexico) and Fundación Río (Chile). Les Films du Losange are steering world sales.
(Translated from French)
