Post Mortem

Venice (In Competition) – Two years ago director Pablo Larraín delivered an attention-grabbing debut in the shape of Tony Manero, a hypnotic blend of political allegory, slasher flick and black comedy. Paul Martin finds out if the Chilean filmmaker can repeat that success with his second feature, Post Mortem.

Although he never quite stoops to the abominable depths of suit-shitting behaviour plumbed by his cinematic forebear, Raúl Peralta – the psychopathic disco-obsessive skilfully fashioned by Pablo Larraín and actor Alfredo Castro in their 2008 collaboration, Tony Manero – there is still much about the behaviour of mortuary worker Mario Cornejo (main man of Post Mortem and again flawlessly played by Castro) to leave audiences feeling disquieted. Sporting long grey barnet and a near-permanent poker face, Mario spends his working days writing up autopsies. Yet his leisure time is occupied by a vigil at his front window, standing motionless and transfixed by the house across the street where cabaret dancer Nancy Ducelma (Antonio Zegers) lives with her father, younger brother, and perpetually barking dog.

Determined as he is to woo Nancy, the perspective on romance adopted by Mario turns out to be rather skewed – idealised or twisted, depending on how sympathetic the viewer is towards oddball loners. He bluntly rejects the advances of his friend and colleague, Sandra (another Manero alumnus, Amparo Nogeura), on the grounds that he cannot countenance seeing her when she has already had relations with their boss, Dr. Castillo (Jaime Vadell), preferring instead to pursue Nancy, a depressed soul seemingly going nowhere, struggling to get stage time even at a sleazy club where the manager berates the ticket-seller for admitting a group of ne'er-do-wells who he fears will ejaculate over the seats of his establishment.

When Mario makes a breakthrough with Nancy and gets to spend time with her in his home – he having the Communist Youth of Chile to thank for this lucky break, after she is driven from her house by the sheer tedium of the meeting of said political organisation taking place there – he still acts in bizarre fashion. When she begins to cry while eating with him, he ignores her for a solid minute or so, refusing to even look in her direction, before then suddenly breaking down in floods of tears himself, an epic trail of spittle emerging from his mouth as he bawls away. And when he takes her to a restaurant, he manages in three sentences to move from issuing a warning about the risks alcohol consumption poses to eyesight, to asking Nancy to marry him, to asking her to be his girlfriend. She leans in with a conniving smirk at this socially inept outburst, Zegers' face suggesting the reaction of her character is situated somewhere between mockery and bemusement.

The rumble of a tank's undercarriage opens Post Mortem, underlining that a violent storm is gathering, and at around the midpoint of Larraín's film it switches from the mix of strange character study and warped romance which it has been to that juncture, to a kind of horror movie, as the real-life coup d'état that in 1973 replaced the socialist presidency of Salvador Allende with the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet invades the narrative. Mario is showering those distinctive locks when the major fighting begins, he emerging to find the house he used to spend so long staring at in near-ruins. Nancy and her family are all missing. The yapping dog remains, but has been wounded.

Mario proceeds towards his place of employment, passing through streets as eerily deserted as those in The Omega Man or 28 Days Later, before finding that the army have established a presence within the mortuary, under the leadership of a stern captain (Marcelo Alonso), and that bodies are coming through the doors in unprecedented numbers. Nancy eventually resurfaces, on the run from the military junta and desperate to locate her father and brother. She is forced to hide out in a hollow wall at Mario's house, he keeping a cupboard pushed over the entrance in the name of optimum obscuration. At work the situation only deteriorates further, the corpses arriving in such volume that they need to be carted around on trolleys like medieval plague victims, all proper autopsy procedures having been abandoned as Dr. Castillo attempts to cope with the multitudinous influx.

Photographed in grainy, washed out tones throughout, like some dated TV show, the second half of Post Mortem is thematically reminiscent of A Report on the Party and the Guests; director Jan Nemec's 1966 illustration of how easily apparently intelligent, seemingly right-minded individuals can be by turns bullied and seduced into accepting fascist rule. This is the route Mario seems destined to head down. From the moment the Captain inducts him into the army without batting an eyelid, he – like Dr. Castillo – fights to rationalise the military coup as a positive, or at least tolerable development. When the mortuary staff are enlisted to conduct a very specific post mortem, the ring of military commanders arrayed around them as they carry out their duties lets them know that only one verdict is acceptable – the verdict prescribed by those very commanders. Castillo duly obliges them, with Mario choosing to accept this farcical outcome as some form of emotional safety blanket while the political maelstrom batters Chile.

Of the mortuary workers, it is left to Sandra to offer some resistance, she finally losing it with the Captain when she helps the survivor of one massacre to hospital, only for him to turn up dead minutes later, one of a gruesome mountain of corpses clogging up the mortuary corridors. As she rants and raves at the soldier, he answers her not with words, but by firing his pistol, serving notice that in the new Chile of Pinochet, dissent will be throttled by displays of force. It is a state of affairs in which you feel the disturbed Mario is complicit by the time Larraín reaches his lengthy, divisively cruel, final shot; the technique of long static shots adopted by the director for this film being used to construct a concluding scene which is less darkly comic than it is just dark.

Rating on a scale of 5 causes of death: 3.5

Release date: TBC
Directed by: Pablo Larraín
Screenplay by: Pablo Larraín
Cast: Alfredo Castro, Antonia Zegers, Amparo Noguera, Jaime Vadell
Cert: TBC
Running Time: 98 minutes

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