Original Coverage & Source Attribution: hollywoodtimes.net
By Kat Guevara
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 10/27/2026 – Manuela Martelli’s The Meltdown screened Tuesday night at the Instituto Cervantes in Los Angeles. The coming-of-age drama lingers on faces like a soap opera with cinematic restraint. Set in Chile in 1992, amid the country’s transition to democracy and globalization, the 108-minute film follows 9-year-old Inés (Maya O’Rourke), who stays with her grandparents at their hotel near an Andean ski resort while her parents exhibit a glacier at a world expo in Seville. There, she quickly befriends Hanna (Maia Rae Domagala), a 14-year-old German professional skier in training. Their instantaneous bond ends prematurely when Hanna goes missing.
In the opening scene, Inés is bleeding from the mouth after losing a milk tooth. Soon after, she and her grandparents watch her father on television as he explains the traveling iceberg as a symbol of reinvention after dictatorship. The scene establishes the parallels between Inés’ maturation and the nation’s transformation that is to emerge.
After Inés and Hanna’s brief connection, Martelli carefully calibrates the gradual unraveling of as tensions simmer beneath the hotel’s day-to-day operations and across elemental and cultural divides: the wealthy and the working class, tourists and locals, snow and fire, interior and exterior. Cigarette smoke, unspoken secrets and suppressed emotions quietly cloak the atmosphere, while María Portugal’s score deepens its underlying unease.
Repression, instinct and social conditioning evoke Freudian tensions among the id, ego and superego. As spring approaches, rain falls and the snow begins to melt. Inés’ birthday coincides with the transition into spring, bringing the film’s psychological and environmental tensions together in an orchestrated crescendo. Her development mirrors just that of her birth nation.
The second feature in Martelli’s trilogy on Chile’s political history explores the simmering tension between preservation and reinvention through an affecting portrait of growing up and reckoning with the past.
