FILM

Chile/Germany/Mexico 2010 98 mins Subtitles Dir: Pablo Larrain Starring: Alfredo Castro, Antonia Zegers

From the team who brought us 'Tony Manero' - you remember: the film about the disco-dancing '70s Chilean serial killer - comes a drama that might as well be a companion piece. Once again, it's set in the '70s, shot on grainy 16mm, and stars Alfredo Castro as a blank protagonist who adheres to no ideology. But whereas 'Tony Manero' was set in the Pinochet era, the backdrop of 'Post Mortem' is the 1973 military coup that swept him to power.

Mario (Castro) is a lonely, lank-haired morgue functionary whose task is to take notes during autopsies. He falls for Nancy (Zegers), the emaciated, washed-up showgirl who lives over the road. Her house is full of political activists organised by her socialist father, so she happily accepts Mario's invitation to come over and they wind up having a good long cry and a shag. Back at the morgue, work is piling up - literally. Mountains of bullet-ridden corpses are cluttering corridors and some of them aren't even properly dead yet. Amid the chaos, Mario finds himself co-opted by the military and dispatched with his team to perform President Allende's autopsy.

From the striking opening ground-level shot of a tank trundling along a city street, director Pablo Larrain keeps the brutal coup very much in the foreground, underlining its corrupting effect on apolitical, already numbed Mario. This is slower and less involving than the more blackly comic 'Tony Manero'. Larrain's penchant for very long static shots is also likely to divide audiences. Sometimes this is highly effective, notably when he keeps the camera trained on oblivious Mario while Nancy's home is being raided. But the bleak eight-minute closing scene is unlikely to send anybody home whistling a happy tune. (Robin Askew)

Website http://postmortemlapelicula.cl/

Opens September 9

Copyright Robin Askew 2011