Writers and Director: Manuela Martelli
Following Black Church Bay also screening at the BFI London Film Festival, Manuela Martelli also submits a complementary film about a missing teenager, The Meltdown, also set in a small community, this time in Chile during a ski trip. With a quiet tension that unfolds, this is far more procedural that Black Church Bay, following the search process and the anxiety it causes the missing girls family and the community, but Martelli’s unique selling point is to set this through the eyes of a younger local child who becomes central to the action.
Set in the 1980s, German student and ski champion Hanna (Maia Domagala) goes missing in the middle of the night after agreeing to go for a walk with a local boy. Seen by 9-year-old Ines when leaving, the little girl gets close to Hanna’s mother during the search process, acting as a translator. But Ines also becomes obsessed with Hanna which her mother starts to resent, and as the snow thickens the chances of finding her begin to recede.
The Meltdown is a very international film, staged in Chile with a Spanish-speaking community, the film also has a group of German students who converse in their native language and a bridge between the two groups which uses English to communicate. This creates an interesting dynamic in the film between the local residents who are less concerned with the missing girl, instead taking an ‘I told you so’ position on the recklessness of young people who don’t know the mountains or the rapidly changing weather that affects this.
This is played well against the weight of the mother’s fears for her daughter and her frustration with the girl’s ski instructor, an underdeveloped storyline that hints at both abuse of the girl that may be borderline sexual and some kind of relationship with the mother, neither of which are fully articulated and could be pertinent to the plot – certainly a chance to see the instructor as a possible suspect in a film that has none at all is passed over.
The child’s-eye view (an excellent Maya O’Rourke as Ines) is innovative and well managed, particularly the complex adult emotions that she doesn’t understand including extremes of rage that come seemingly from nowhere – although we know they are grief-driven. However, again Martelli doesn’t really explore the situation of the child left in the care of her grandparents while her mother and father are in Spain at a festival, why she sleeps in the beds of several of the staff and Hanna – a chance to explore her own feelings of isolation – and the obsession she forms with the missing girl. There are lots of further possibilities here but The Meltdown underplays them.
A slow burn drama with lovely cinematography, particularly in the snow-filled sections, as it melts so too does the film’s own solidity, leaving too many loose ends to be a truly satisfying experience.
The Meltdown is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2026 from 7-18 October.
