Pablo Larraín first broke onto the international film scene when Tony Manero premiered at the Cannes Directors´ Fortnight. This Chilean director has now followed up with visceral Post Mortem. Mario Cornejo is going about his daily business of writing autopsy reports at the military hospital in Santiago, when the Pinochet coup d´état shakes this heretofore apolitical character out of his state of apathy. This passionately executed film by Larraín has met with brilliant reviews, competing at the Venice Film Festival and nabbing second place at the Havana Film Festival´s Coral Awards. Post Mortem is neither a reconstruction of the Pinochet days, nor an angry denunciation of the period.

Instead, Larraín offers a borderline-surreal –Lynchian–black comedy to show, among other things, how easy it is for ordinary people to sleepwalk into a climate of atrocity, either as victims, collaborators, or as both. As in his first film, Larraín invests his characters with metaphoric undertones, suffusing the city of Santiago with a surreal visual texture that evokes the nightmarish landscape it was rapidly becoming.