May 14, 2026 7:22am PT

‘The Meltdown’ Review: A Missing-Girl Mystery Becomes a Political Allegory as Remote as its Andean Setting

Chilean writer-director Manuela Martelli's second feature provides appropriately spartan commentary on her country's culture of silence in the immediate aftermath of Pinochet, but adds up to less than the sum of its individually impressive parts.

Jessica Kiang

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Jessica Kiang

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Courtesy of Ronda Cine, Cannes Film festival

Four years ago, Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight premiered Chilean actor Manuela Martelli‘s superb directorial debut “Chile ’76,” which tracked with sinister precision the stirring of a complacently bourgeois housewife’s political conscience during the repressive Pinochet regime. Her follow-up, “The Meltdown,” now plays in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, but while the filmmaking is just as elegant and the storyline similarly observes sociopolitical upheaval acting on an individual psychology, the result is somewhat less resonant. Perhaps because here, it’s the far more slippery and elusive notion of the nation’s collective silence in the aftermath of its Pinochet trauma that is under the microscope. And perhaps because the subject is a child.