With the halfway point of this year’s Cannes Film Festival fast approaching, one of the best movies I’ve seen is a Chilean chiller called The Meltdown. The story is set in a snowy ski lodge high up in the Andes, where a precocious 9-year-old named Inés (a wonderful Maya O’Rourke) befriends a German skier who promptly disappears. This elusive mystery is set in 1992, less than two years after the democratic election of Patricio Aylwin marked the end of the Pinochet era. If the movie has a central tenet, however, it’s that some habits die hard.
The Meltdown is the latest movie from Manuela Martelli, an actress-turned-filmmaker (she starred in Sebastian Lelio’s Navidad in 2009, amongst others) whose debut feature, Chile ‘76, examined the psychology of a middle-class woman as she engaged with a political moment she’d spent her life trying to avoid. In a way, the hero of The Meltdown goes through that process in reverse. She’s asked by an older relative to bite her tongue after seeing something that might damage her family’s way of life—even if, under different circumstances, what she knows could lead to the lost girl’s discovery or at least point the way toward finding those responsible.
Before those hard decisions come her way, however, Inés’ world and the world of Martelli’s movie is one of cozy winter knitwear and boredom. The story, in both big picture and small, is about a generation gap that leaves Inés as one of the only English speakers in her family’s hotel. This also means that she spends her days assisting the staff as a translator, namely the receptionist Techa (Paulina Urrutia), who has been basically looking after her since mom and dad have traveled halfway across the globe to bring a 60-tonne iceberg (roughly the size of a double-decker bus) to the ‘92 Seville World Expo. This fascinating real-world stunt, archive footage of which Martelli uses to open the movie, was dreamed up as a way to showcase that the freshly democratic country was technologically advanced and thus open for business—but not everyone is convinced. As Techa notices while watching Inés’ father being interviewed on TV, will it not also lead people to believe that Chile is still in need of some post-dictatorship thawing out?
As far as the movie is concerned, some warmth arrives in the form of Hanna (Maia Rae Domagala)—a 15-year-old girl and Olympic hopeful whose grueling training regime has required her to chase the snow—thus damning her adolescence into a perennial winter. This lack of exposure to vitamin D has, however, resulted in some interesting hobbies: these include writing moody diary entries, smoking cigarettes, listening to industrial German post-punk music, and wearing black nail polish—or in other words, she’s a vision of Gen-X cosmopolitan angst that leaves Inés in awe. Eyeing a rare chance for camaraderie, the younger girl quickly and diligently gets to work to become her friend.
From this point on, The Meltdown shifts gears into a low-key thriller, building to an evening that begins with Inés helping Hanna in getting served at the hotel bar and ends with her looking on in secret as Hanna is cajoled into going out for the night. There is also the hovering figure of Hanna’s coach (Jakub Gierszal), whose history with the girl is left shrouded in a murky cloud—all the better to hammer home the movie’s theme of innocence lost. In the second half, the void left by Hanna’s disappearance is partially filled by her distraught mother (an excellent Saskia Rosenthal), who, as her daughter explains, was herself once a famous skier, albeit for “a country that doesn’t exist anymore.”
This inviting soup of broken dreams and national disappointments reaches a simmer during one of the snippets of contemporaneous TV news footage that Martelli includes in the movie, in which we see the early days of what would become a decades-long process to identify the tens of thousands of people who disappeared during the Pinochet era and ended up in mass graves. The central question in The Meltdown is whether Inés will realize on time that the country her parents grew up in doesn’t exist anymore, either.
The Meltdown premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.