‘Meteorite’ Venice Review: Colombian Director Sebastián Múnera Builds a Dreamlike World Haunted by Violence

Fascinating, if at times almost impossible to decipher, Colombian filmmaker Sebastián Múnera’s debut feature Meteorite follows the lives of two friends, Tefa and Nia, who live near the Magdalena River and help raise Nia’s young nephew. Their days unfold around simple routines: trips to the river, conversations, and, in Nia’s case, visits to a nearby prison. There she sees an inmate with whom she has sex and, more importantly, conducts a small-scale smuggling operation, moving contraband in and out of the facility.

Nia (Ángela Cano) persuades Tefa (Luna Gaviria) to join her in this line of work, and much of the film revolves around a trip the three of them make to the prison for precisely that purpose. But just a short distance away, at Hacienda Nápoles in Antioquia, there is a peculiar amusement park built on what was once Pablo Escobar’s sprawling estate, where the drug lord kept animals brought in from all over the world. Between one tense prison visit and the next, the three friends are drawn into the strange attractions of this exotic place. Sooner or later, though, they have to return to the less playful business of getting cellphones into the prison.

Meteorite is an unusual film: beautiful, poetic and shadowy, shot in remote natural settings and sustained by a distinctive rhythm throughout its relatively brief 80-minute running time. Rather than steering its story toward conventional psychological drama or historical-political commentary, Múnera opts for something more sensory, built around glances, bodies, fragments of stories and scenes whose fascination lies partly in their hazy sense of decay.

Against this dense physical landscape, a vision of Colombian history gradually comes into focus. The darkest chapters of the country’s past —political violence, the drug trade, the dead carried along by that same river— seem to rise to the surface, at times bleeding into the present. Strictly speaking, Meteorite is not a fantasy film, but it is shot with the atmosphere of a horror movie. Its horror, however, has little to do with supernatural events and everything to do with the way the world itself operates.

At times the film can feel almost impenetrable, as if it takes pleasure in constructing images and situations that are beautiful precisely because they resist explanation. But when the symbolism recedes and the sensations, experiences and even the humor shared by Nia and Tefa come to the fore, Meteorite finds a more direct connection to something human. It is through these two women and what they experience that we begin to enter the world Múnera is describing: a country shaped by violence, and two women trying, in their own way, to survive its aftermath.