The Meltdown (El deshielo) by Manuela Martelli is a post-Pinochet mystery drama set in an Andes ski resort, selected to represent the country in the Best International Feature category at the 2027 Academy Awards. Martelli’s follow-up to her acclaimed drama Chile, 1976 had its world premiere at Cannes’ prominent strand Un Certain Regard this year.
Martelli’s The Meltdown is a drama that borders on being a thriller but eschews procedural mystery elements in favor of focusing on the viewpoint of a young Chilean girl, It’s a well-made film that feels a bit narratively thin, but that almost feels intentional. After all, it’s a film about confused emotions and how easy it is for something or someone to get lost in the night. So, it should kind of slip through your fingers. Martelli is clearly a talented filmmaker, and her work here marks her as someone to watch going forward.
The Meltdown unfolds in an Andean ski resort in Chile in 1992. Nine-year-old Ines (Maya O’Rourke) is staying there with her grandparents, watching the bigger kids ski gracefully up and down the mountain. She’s particularly taken with the 15-year-old Hanna (Maia Rae), who seems to be the one she kind of looks up to like a big sister. Hanna’s beauty has drawn the attention of the older men around her, giving the early scenes of “The Meltdown” a sense of predatory dread, which are underscored by the haunting soundtrack and music.
The seemingly insurmountable age gap, the two can speak the same language at the Vista del Volcán Hotel in the Andes where the younger, Chilean-born Inés has been groomed to speak English. The German-born Hanna knows English from being a world traveler, going where the snow is as part of an Olympic practice squad for skiing. Hanna is the only young woman on a team full of rowdy teenage boys, so when stuck at the resort, it isn’t entirely strange for her to end up warming up to Inés, who also seems a bit stranded in the care of her grandparents who run the resort while her parents are abroad and both have a penchant for going places that they are prohibited from.
The Meltdown is set in 1992 following the end of Pinochet’s violent reign as the country was trying to turn the page and seeking a more stable democracy. Glimpses are shown of a likely futile effort in this regard as Chile went to great lengths to shave off a sample of an iceberg from Antarctica to present at a global exposition in Seville to express their transportation might be a likely building block for the future. Intended as a less-than-ideal visual metaphor when much as it gleam, the iceberg becomes a . a reflection of an ideal melting away.
Martelli creates a far more potent one symbol of deciding that to do in the situation directly in front of her and how much of her past to hold onto as she moves into the future, only somewhat conscious of the history when she’s only just been born. When Hanna literally disappears one night, fingers point at a boy she had been talking to or possibly even her tough instructor. Her mother Lina (an excellent Saskia Rosendahl) comes to the region to join in the search. She was a former champion ice skater, originally from East Germany (DDR) back when Germany was still a divided country – which she explains to young Ines is “a country that no longer exists.”
Inés’ ability to speak English is actually unusual at the Vista del Volcán where the much older staff regularly puts her on the phone to talk to guests, placing an undue amount of responsibility on the minor, especially once Hanna eventually goes missing and she becomes a primary go-between for Hanna’s mother Lina (Saskia Rosendahl) and the Spanish-speaking community once a search gets underway. The translation serves an obvious practical purpose for the drama, but has fascinating implications when English allows for the type of connection to the broader international community that her country as a whole would seem to desire, yet the exchange can be as fraught as it is rewarding and leaning into it too much could threaten the erosion of how she interacts with other Chileans.
The search for Hanna also plays out alongside the potential sale of the hotel to a group of Spanish developers that Inés’ grandmother Techa (Paulina Urrutia) is trying hard to impress, instructing the child to be discrete when any details of the investigation could complicate a sale, a chilling reminder of the pervasive silence that gave Pinochet more power and the idea of ceding land to foreign interests questionable on its face. (As the bartender at the hotel confides at one point, his family has been on the land for generations, proudly taking out a picture from long before the hotel was built, yet now a worker rather than an owner.)
Lina and the prepubescent Inés both have an incentive to let go of what they know yet can’t for different reasons, owing to what experience they have or lack. There is no easy narrative resolution. The past has the potential to be paralyzing in “The Meltdown,” but in confronting this kind of trap, Martelli leaves us with a final image of Ines wondering if her missing German friend will actually “return in the spring.”
