Manuela Martelli’s second feature sees a young Chilean girl unravel a chilly mystery when a young skier’s goes missing at her grandparents’ ski resort.
There’s not a lot for nine-year-old Inés (Maya O’Rourke) to do at her grandparents’ hotel deep in the Andes. Her older male cousins are into skiing, but they’re a little rough for Inés, and there aren’t any guests her own age to keep her entertained while her parents are away working in Spain. She mostly hangs around with the staff, to her grandparents’ chagrin, but the arrival a German skiing team – specifically the 15-year-old Hanna (Maia Rae Domagala) – instantly changes things as the teenager becomes a source of fascination for the shy Inés. Moreover, Hanna, who smokes in secret and is the most promising member of her team per her coach Alexander (Jakub Gierszal), is instantly kind to Inés, humouring the younger girl when she presents Hanna with a token of her affection (a homemade biscuit which suffered an injury after one of her cousins starting eating it by accident).
Delighted to finally have a friend, Inés starts showing Lina around the snowy woodland that surrounds the hotel, and even introduces her to her cousin who likewise takes a shine to the foreigner – but things take a sinister turn when Hanna goes missing one night without a trace. The subsequent search for Hanna makes up the bulk of Manuela Martelli’s confident sophomore feature, set in 1992 after Augustus Pinochet had left office in Chile, but during a period where the country continued to be marked by his actions and the scars of the military dictatorship.
A former actor herself, Martelli has a keen eye for performance – O’Rourke and Domagala carry the bulk of the film and do so tremendously for a pair of youngsters, particularly the former whose character is quiet but carefully observant, seemingly all too aware that many of the adults around her are unreliable. She’s determined to unravel the mystery of her new friend’s disappearance when the local police show little interest in doing so, hampered by poor weather and belief that the teenager simply ran away due to the pressure of her sport.
The narrative becomes more complex as revelations emerge about Hanna’s life, particularly once her distance mother Lina (Saskia Rosendahl) arrives at the hotel from Germany. The lonely Inés is drawn towards her for both the connection to her missing friend and her own desire for maternal stability, but there’s much more to Martelli’s chilly thriller than the obvious mystery. The film’s period setting makes the allusion to Pinochet’s forced disappearances obvious, while the efforts of Inés’ grandparents to impress a group of potential Spanish investors reflect a national effort to reposition Chile in the wake of the ended military dictatorship. It’s a coming-of-age film with real ambition, and a haunting final sequence that leaves an impression long after the cut to black.
