‘The Meltdown’ Cannes Review: Martelli’s Chilling, Snow-Bound Mystery

Following the strong reception of her debut feature 1976 — which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes — Chilean actress-turned-director Manuela Martelli returns with something equally dark but more serpentine and harder to pin down. Billed as a blend of drama and thriller, El deshielo is ultimately something more intimate: a coming-of-age story about a precocious nine-year-old girl who becomes, through a series of unexpected turns, the central figure in a police investigation.

Inés (Maya O’Rourke) has the run of a ski resort in southern Chile managed by her family. The year is 1992, in the immediate aftermath of Pinochet’s long dictatorship, and for much of its runtime the film is content to follow this small, sharp-eyed girl as she moves through the resort and attaches herself to the people around her. Her parents are away in Spain — part of the Chilean delegation to Expo Seville ’92, where the country famously exhibited a block of Antarctic iceberg — leaving Inés in the care of grandparents who are present but preoccupied with running the business. She gravitates instead toward the receptionist, the cleaning women, the kitchen staff, and, thanks to her fluent English, a steady stream of foreign guests passing through.

Among them is a group of German skiers who take a particular interest in her, especially their star athlete, Hanna (Maia Rae Domagala) — a teenager who has a visibly strained relationship with the team’s coach, Alexander (Jakub Gierszal). Despite the age gap, Inés and Hanna strike up a genuine friendship. They wander the snow-covered grounds around the hotel, trade confidences, and find unexpected common ground: both of their countries have just undergone seismic political transformations, and even at their respective ages, that parallel surfaces in conversation.

Then one day, after a series of tense encounters with Alexander and a night out with one of Inés’s cousins, Hanna vanishes. An investigation begins — and Inés finds herself at the center of it, both because she speaks English and because she knows more about Hanna’s final hours at the hotel than anyone else. Her grandparents, however, make it clear that she should keep certain things to herself and not volunteer opinions. When Lina (Saskia Rosendahl), Hanna’s distraught mother, arrives at the resort, Inés gravitates toward her as well — part investigative partner, part surrogate daughter filling a temporary void.

Martelli finds the right atmosphere for all of this: an isolated hotel buried in snow, the early nineties rendered with a convincing sense of limited connectivity and ambient unease. The score nudges things toward thriller territory with perhaps a bit more insistence than is strictly necessary, but what keeps the film grounded — and genuinely interesting — is O’Rourke’s remarkable performance. Young Inés is not really trying to solve a mystery in any conventional sense. She is trying to understand the adults around her, to make sense of what they do and do not say. The family silence she has been raised inside — a silence that functions as an unmistakable metaphor for Chile’s collective suppression of its own recent history, its own disappeared — becomes the film’s real subject. Truth-seeking, in this environment, runs up against powerful institutional resistance.

The film occasionally tips into a gravity and solemnity that feel slightly forced, as though Martelli is anxious to distinguish her work from the glut of streaming thrillers built around missing girls and gendered violence. The anxiety is understandable but somewhat unnecessary, because what actually separates The Meltdown from that territory is already evident: Inés’s gaze, the film’s consistently broader thematic ambitions, and the growing sense that this is less a disappearance thriller than a story about a girl losing her innocence — discovering, against the blinding whiteness of the landscape, how much darkness she has been surrounded by all along.