movies
‘The Meltdown’ Review: Slow-Burn Mystery Set in Chile’s Wintry Andes
As The Meltdown (El Deshielo) begins, vintage news footage reveals the strange-but-true sight of something being lifted out of a frosty sea. It’s a huge chunk of an Antarctic iceberg, on its way to becoming the centerpiece of Chile’s pavilion at the 1992 world’s fair. As a symbol of national ingenuity and know-how, the frosty specimen is kind of out-there. And yet, for a country emerging from 17 years of military rule and determined to redefine itself, it represents an understandable leap of faith. It’s also an apt starting point for a movie in which submerged things come to light, if only briefly — a coming-of-age story where the key lesson is to keep what you know to yourself.
Manuela Martelli’s well-received debut, 1976 (aka Chile ’76), a selection of the 2022 Directors’ Fortnight, took place during Chile’s Pinochet era. The writer-director sets her sophomore feature barely two years after the country shook off the despot’s iron grip. Inés, the lead character, was born in the final years of the dictatorship. A cherub-faced 9-year-old with an old soul, she watches the grown-ups around her calibrate their actions to a shifting world. Truth, she discovers, is less important than the ability to anticipate how people will react to it.
The Meltdown
The Bottom Line
Haunted and haunting.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
Cast: Maya O’Rourke, Saskia Rosendahl, Maia Rae Domagala, Jakub Gierszal, Paulina Urrutia, Mauricio Pešutić
Director-screenwriter: Manuela Martelli
1 hour 48 minutes
Watchful, precocious and utterly un-cutesy in the compelling performance of Maya O’Rourke, Inés moves freely around her grandparents’ mountain ski lodge while her mother and father are away. It’s not clear whether they’re bureaucrats, scientists, artists or entrepreneurs, but they’re in Spain as members of Chile’s iceberg-delivering delegation at Expo ’92 in Seville. While her grandmother, Techa (Paulina Urrutia), and grandfather, Ricardo (Mauricio Pešutić), are busy entertaining potential investors, Inés basically has the run of the place, a tightly operated and pleasingly dated hotel in a remote corner of the Andes, near a ski lift. Inés is friends with the pair of hardy dogs who oversee the property, and moves easily among the hotel’s employees and, later, when she’s in detective mode, its guest rooms. She hangs with receptionist Sonia (Paula Zúñiga) at the front desk, trades greetings with Sonia’s brother, bartender Genaro (Luis Uribe), and, against Techa’s wishes, slips into the room of housekeeper Paty (Daniela Pino) when she doesn’t want to sleep alone.
Inés becomes fascinated with one of the guests, a German skier about five years her senior. Hanna (Maia Rae Domagala), the only girl on her training team, is also its star, but her dwindling drive frustrates her coach, Alexander (Jakub Gierszal), whose bond with Hanna appears more complicated and troubling each time the screenplay places them together.
Inés approaches the teen with a homemade gift, and despite their age difference, they bond readily, two girls separated from their parents, English their common language. Hanna shares her broody music and dark nail polish, and alludes to strained relations with her single mother, a former skating champion from East Germany or, as Hanna calls it, “a country that doesn’t exist anymore.” German reunification took place within months of Pinochet’s replacement as president, and Martelli’s screenplay is sensitive to a child’s-eye view of dramatic geopolitical events. Wise-beyond-her-years Inés is vaguely aware that a brother of Sonia and Genaro’s is one of Chile’s desaparecidos, assumed murdered by the government.
Exploring the snow-covered mountain, the girls skip stones on its frozen lake and traipse through its defunct military outpost, a piece of land that Inés’ grandparents are determined to sell to a couple from Madrid. With visions of a high-end skiers’ destination and a substantial payday, Techa cautions her granddaughter: “Behave yourself while the Spaniards are here.”
But troubling events intrude on the Spaniards’ visit: One morning, after an eventful evening that includes separate and overlapping interludes with Alexander, Inés and Sebastián (Lautaro Cantillana), Inés’ teenage cousin, Hanna is gone. A disappearance, a far-flung location — it’s a classic plot engine, fueled by upheaval and dark secrets, and given fresh life in this telling. Benjamín Echazarreta’s cinematography is alert to the workaday energy of the hotel as well as the eerie beauty of the setting, with its mix of fairy-tale wonder and bone-deep dread. The discordant, Bernard Herrmann-esque bursts of María Portugal’s rich score ratchet up the suspense and foreboding.
The film’s second half places Inés alongside Hanna’s anguished mother, Lina, brought to anxious, guilt-ridden, ferocious life by Saskia Rosendahl. Excluded from the local authorities’ search for her daughter, Lina conducts her own. A hopeful but guarded Inés rides shotgun with her and serves as translator when necessary, a role that puts her in an uncomfortable and painfully enlightening spot when the official excuses are pathetic or the civilian indifference is acute. Among the various aspects of the movie that its English title refers to, not least is the unhinged rampage Lina unleashes at a couple of schoolgirls, a gringa loca on the razor’s edge.
The movie’s Spanish title could also be translated as The Thaw, as fitting and double-edged as The Meltdown, but with a slightly different slant, as in Lina’s eventual warming to Inés. It’s the kind of motherly attention that should come with a warning label.
Martelli, herself an accomplished actor, has drawn persuasive and involving performances from her international cast. The production design by Nohemí González and Carolina Espina’s costumes are outstanding contributions that never overshadow the action (though the hand-stitched embroidery on one of Inés’ sweaters might break your heart a little with its brightness and innocence).
In a couple of instances, the director overplays her hand. The opening sequence ponders a long, slow swirl of blood down a bathroom sink — from a child’s lost baby tooth, no less — that feels like foreshadowing in overdrive. Later, a long close-up of a shattered glass of milk works neither as visual rhyme with the snowy setting nor dramatic insight. It’s merely distracting.
But these are quibbles when a movie conjures a world as aching and in-between as the one in The Meltdown. Confused connections, parental proxies, colonial histories — Martelli interweaves these narrative strands with skill and artistry. Through the mystery of one person’s fate, a young hero awakens to certain ground rules and discovers a haunted place. You might call it the place of things that “you don’t think about but are still there,” as the story’s unhappy teenager puts it in the journal she’s left behind.
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movies
Obama Relives Tan Suit Debacle In ‘Life, Larry & Pursuit of Unhappiness’
As Larry David‘s comedic trip through U.S. history comes to an end, he took credit for one of the nation’s more recent presidential scandals.
On Friday’s season finale of the HBO sketch comedy miniseries Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, President Barack Obama made a surprise appearance as himself in a sketch set in 2014, as David advised him to wear the now-infamous, outrage-inducing tan suit during his live press conference on military response to ISIS.
Following some banter on how the POTUS avoids stains, David accidentally spills juice on Obama’s suit jacket when he leaves the room. When the 44th president returns, the comedian recommends he wear the tan suit that Obama planned on taking it to Turin for NATO Summit, for “a daytime event, it’s outdoors, a little more casual.”
“First of all, it’s a gorgeous suit,” David declared. “And this is casual Friday!”
“It is a great suit,” admitted Obama, as David told him, “Oh boy, oh boy. I think this is the move. … Old lips won’t let you down. You’ll thank me!”
As Obama models the look, David gives him his signature, “Pretty good! Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.”
“You sure about this?” asks Obama, as David assures him, “Never been more sure about anything in my life. People are going to be talking about this for a long, long time.”
Obama’s cameo in the finale comes as David marks the United States Semiquencentennial with the seven-part sketch comedy limited series, which recounts major events in U.S. history through the comedian’s signature observational humor.
David’s longtime Curb Your Enthusiasm partner Jeff Schaffer, who serves as an executive producer on Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, previously told Deadline that Obama, who produced under his Higher Ground banner, reached out to his buddy David to ask if he’d be interested in making the show to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday.
“When you’re doing a show about American history, you want to do it warts and right now we have this orange saggy wart that we wish would go away,” said Schaffer. “But the nice thing about having President Obama produce this and be a part of it is that this country’s had a lot of fuck ups, we’ve seemed to have learned very little, but we’re still moving forward sometimes, and then we move back a little bit, but we always move forward again. While Larry’s pointing out a lot of the steps back, the President is telling us we can still step forward.”
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movies
Matthew McConaughey Performs “Quill” From ‘Rivals of Amziah King’ — Watch
Matthew McConaughey shows off his vocal skills (and some hidden banjo talents) with his latest role in The Rivals of Amziah King.
On Friday, Lakeshore Records released the single and music video for “Quill” from the original motion picture soundtrack, performed by the Oscar-winning and co-star Ben Hardesty, also featuring Miranda Zickler, Angelina LookingGlass and Andrea Pister.
Set in the backwoods of Oklahoma, The Rivals of Amziah King follows the musically gifted Amaziah King (McConaughey) and his bluegrass-playing band of misfits while overseeing the premier honey-making operation in town. When Amaziah’s estranged foster daughter unexpectedly returns, he leaps at the chance to reconnect and create a family business. But the honey game is ruthless, and Amaziah’s rivals threaten to destroy everything he has built.
Premiering Aug. 14 in theaters, the Andrew Patterson-written-and-directed drama also stars Angelina LookingGlass, Cole Sprouse, Jake Horowitz, Tony Revolori and Kurt Russell.
Producers are David Heyman, Teddy Schwarzman, Jeffrey Clifford, Michael Heimler, James Montague and Will Greenfield.
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movies
Jane Schoenbrun On Tackling “Toxic Soup” Of Slasher Genre In ‘Camp Miasma’
With their latest directorial outing, Jane Schoenbrun used subtle pieces of nostalgia to deconstruct the slasher genre.
The Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma writer/director explained to Deadline that they wanted to create “a mindset where you can really enjoy something scary,” noting the frequent symbolism of candy and junk food as providing an atmosphere “that’s actually safe” while diving into a horror movie or exploring sexuality after trauma.
“There is this idea that if it gets too real, you can turn it off, that you’re exploring something dangerous, doing it in a way that’s actually safe,” said Schoenbrun, who is non-binary. “Which in my experience of coming into my sexual identity post-transition, kind of required some gummy candy on hand. What I mean by that is, even if we’re going to be exploring scary and vulnerable and potentially embarrassing, triggering parts of ourselves, we trust each other well enough to know that at any moment, we can be like, ‘Let’s stop, we gotta just eat some fucking gummies.’”
In Schoenbrun’s latest film, Hannah Einbinder stars as queer director Kris, who is tapped to helm a new installment of the long-running Camp Miasma horror franchise. While courting Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the actress who played the “final girl” in the original film, to reprise her role, the pair spirals into a psychosexual frenzy as the slasher’s killer, Little Death (Jack Haven), comes to life.
Acknowledging the problematic trans representation of horror films like Psycho (1960), Sleepaway Camp (1983), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995), Schoenbrun admitted the genre has been “catnip to me since I was 10 years old,” and they jumped at the chance to direct their own.

“So many slashers do have this sense of humor, and even if they’re not overtly meta like the Scream movies are, they’re so aware of their own tropes and the sort of rituals … And I just loved that from a young age and loved all of the little rituals within it, and so, getting to make my own is just like play and joy,” they explained.
“But it also felt like the perfect way to talk about sex and to talk about my experience as a trans person post-transition, learning how to come into a sexual identity that I could feel comfortable within, because so many of these movies are obviously deeply engaged in gender and sexual roles, and these movies have so much to say for better or for worse about deviants,” said Schoenbrun. “It is there in the DNA of the slasher genre that these movies are talking about fear and desire, gender and sexuality, normativity and deviance. And that’s all swimming in the toxic soup of the genre, so I wanted to remake it in my own language.”
Read on about Jane Schoenbrun’s love letter to the slasher genre with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, now playing in theaters.
DEADLINE: It was really fun to see the slasher genre through your eyes. Tell me about finding inspiration in that genre and “final girls.”
JANE SCHOENBRUN: I mean, it was the easiest thing in the world because it’s just one of those genres that has been catnip to me since I was 10 years old. I just raided the horror section of the video store as a kid from an age when I really shouldn’t have been doing that, like in 5th grade, I watched in the span of about one week, every Nightmare on Elm Street movie. I think that I was always drawn to movies and really anything entertainment where it felt forbidden in some way, like the thing on the tape, how is that even allowed? And that’s the thing that I love about a lot of my favorite slashers. Don’t get me wrong, I love like brutal ones, like I love Texas Chainsaw, that’s a nasty movie at its core, and that’s what’s so special about it. But so many slashers do have this sense of humor, and even if they’re not overtly meta like the Scream movies are, they’re so aware of their own tropes and the sort of rituals of, OK, what’s the most outrageous way that like these like dumb kids can get killed? But watching it, it’s not about fear a lot of the time, it’s about joy and celebration. And I just loved that from a young age and loved all of the little rituals within it, and so, getting to make my own is just like play and joy. But it also felt like the perfect way to talk about sex and to talk about my experience as a trans person post-transition, learning how to come into a sexual identity that I could feel comfortable within, because so many of these movies are obviously deeply engaged in gender and sexual roles, and these movies have so much to say for better or for worse about deviants, whether that be Norman Bates or Buffalo Bill or Sleepway Camp or Jason, Michael Myers, Leatherface in drag. It is there in the DNA of the slasher genre that these movies are talking about fear and desire, gender and sexuality, normativity and deviance. And that’s all swimming in the toxic soup of the genre, so I wanted to remake it in my own language.

DEADLINE: I’m curious about the symbolism of all the processed junk food and the chandelier of wrappers.
SCHOENBRUN: The junk food in the movie, I forget when it found its way in there. It’s like so much of the movie is about, like I said, ritual, about being in a mindset where you can really enjoy something scary, whether that be Kris [Hannah Einbinder] in bed, with, you know, with Raisinets and the popcorn, watching a schlocky horror movie, or the two characters learning how to be present and enjoy sex after a lot of trauma. There is this idea that if it gets too real, you can turn it off, that you’re exploring something dangerous, doing it in a way that’s actually safe. Which in my experience of coming into my sexual identity post-transition, kind of required some gummy candy on hand. What I mean by that is, even if we’re going to be exploring scary and vulnerable and potentially embarrassing, triggering parts of ourselves, we trust each other well enough to know that at any moment, we can be like, “Let’s stop, we gotta just eat some fucking gummies.”
DEADLINE: And one thing I really love—I just feel like it’s a theme in your work—is how it depicts the way media and entertainment influence us. Why does that inspire you?
SCHOENBRUN: I think it comes from a fascination and sensitivity to the complex relationship between what we think of as fiction and what we think of as reality, which we tend to, as a society, think of as pointing in one direction. Like, reality dictates fiction, not vice-versa, but when you actually look at the way the world works, it’s like one echoes off the other. And I think a complicated, sometimes terrifying and sometimes beautiful way, where the fiction, the cultural norms, the things we grow up looking at on our screens, the roles that we’re told people play, they kind of inspire us to create reality. There’s something liberating when you start thinking in that way. I think it’s a way of thinking that we as a culture, could do a lot more of. To think about the idea of fiction inspiring reality just as much as reality is inspiring fiction, is a potential path to liberating us from this hellscape that they’re telling us is the only way the world can be.

DEADLINE: And I know you have the Secretary reading. Tell me what it’s been like prepping for that and why you all chose that movie.
SCHOENBRUN: I mean, that was such a huge influence on on Miasma. There just aren’t that many fun and funny movies about deviant sex. And just the way that movie is like feather light while talking about really raw and taboo things, it is just really inspiring to me. And the dynamic between those two main characters is definitely one that had a lot of influence on on Kris and Billy’s [Gillian Anderson] relationship in Miasma. And it’s already to me a very queer movie in its way, but having Gillian reading the James Spader part and Hannah reading the Maggie Gyllenhaal part, I think it’s just gonna be like a very unique joy. Honestly, we’ve been prepping a little bit, but I think it’s just gonna be about getting up there and feeling the chemistry of it all, and just letting these folks who we have all gotten to know each other really, really well, but we haven’t actually done anything wacky and creative like that in a while, like as a reunion, it’s gonna be a real blast, I think.
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