Maya O’Rourke is sublime in Manuela Martelli’s El Deshielo (or The Meltdown), a tense, paranoia-charged thriller about a German teenager who goes missing from a ski resort hotel in Chile. Tender and slow-moving despite its difficult subject, there seems to be a lot to unpack initially – small town politics, post-fascism Chile, mother-daughter relationships, and the pressures of sports competitions to name a few. Yet, as the case and plot unroll, none of these themes are given room to breathe, and so it is that El Deshielo relies solely on O’Rourke’s breathtaking performance to get it down the slope safely.
As the owners’ granddaughter, whose parents are “somewhere on the other side of the world”, O’Rourke as Ines is inherently curious about all the hotel’s guests, sneaking into people’s rooms and the bar when no one is looking, eager to befriend those that are not staff or her immediate family. Hanna (Maia Rae Domagala) in this sense is a dream come true – a troubled, fifteen year old professional skier training with her team, who wants to be her friend. But when she goes missing, Ines sets out to find out what happened to her – yet, as she is about to find out, nothing is that simple in the adult world.
With nothing more than a simple, furtive look, O’Rourke gives us the world – she is caring and attentive with both hotel guests and us, the audience, adapting quickly to the tone of the room and what those around her need. Yet, what unfolds around her becomes increasingly murky – the last person to see Hanna before her disappearance was Ines’ cousin Seba (Lautaro Cantillana Teke), who wakes her up in the middle of the night for a lovers’ moonlit walk (to lesser romantic effect). Ines’ grandparents, worried that this will point the blame towards their family, whisk Seba back to his parents, and he is never seen again. From here, one ponders the meaning of their actions – are there family secrets Ines is not being told? What of the long-term barman’s brother, who died nearby? Nothing to this effect comes to light. Similarly, when Hanna’s mother Lina (Saskia Rosendahl) arrives to help with the search for her daughter, a flicker of hope, of a meaningful development, becomes a possibility, especially as suspicions around Alexander (Jakub Gierszal), Hannah’s coach, arise – only to be blown out almost immediately.
Perhaps the messaging behind El Deshielo is that sometimes, people just disappear – but when so many tantalising threads are drawn out from its characters and none of them are given more than a few scenes to be developed, the result becomes something increasingly stale and confusing. Ines, “abandoned” by her parents, and Lina, now daughterless, are allowed a brief moment of respite in each other’s comfort, cherishing a bond that has been lost to both – but even this is not the central focus point of the story, and so is discarded just as quickly as one’s skis. Thriller-cum-detective-story-cum-social-drama, El Deshielo is not enough and too much all at once – but at the heart of it confidently marches O’Rourke with the most sensational maturity, and so it is that, despite its muddled storyline, we can take the time to simply rejoice in her presence.
El Deshielo screened at the London Film Festival and is scheduled to appear the Leeds International Film Festival on 31 October 2026.
