Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s Post Mortem will tease and torture you. This is the turgid, drab tale of a civil servant, Mario (Alfredo Castro), who transcribes the notes of a coroner in Santiago, 1973. Mario has a thing for his neighbour, Nancy Puelma (Antonia Zegers) a fading cabaret dancer with connections to some politically minded radicals. After entering her backstage change room one night he goes to peculiar lengths to win her friendship and later, her job back once she’s discarded by her employer.
Post Mortem is a true endurance test and; there’s virtually nothing to admire or even mildly like about it. The political context acts as background noise but Larrain’s obsession is with a static foreground seeped in drab colours and peopled with ugly entities denied colouring.
Part of the film’s aesthetic downfall comes from the manner in which Larrain irrationally holds uninteresting shots to unexceptional, pointless lengths. Only the boredom distracts, lulling you into a terminal slumber. Castro contributes what can only be termed a ‘non-performance’; he simply ‘exists’ as the film’s centrepiece, emptily present like a toxic grey cloud that can’t be budged.
What motivates a director to create such a blank slate of a character a man so dull, dead-eyed and unsympathetic in every way? You could argue the social disillusionment of the time in Chile engineered such degrees of apathy but as a filmic representation Post Mortem induces an almost physical pain, so torturous is it to endure. The unreasonably elongated final scene is symptomatic of either Larrain’s self-indulgence or very perverse sense of humour. Wiping my hands of this film forever I can’t muster the energy to ponder it any further.
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