Post Mortem

Pablo Larrain's breathtaking visual command makes for enthralling viewing in Post Mortem, a rigorous, formally controlled yet emotionally gripping drama set during Chile's bloody 1973 military coup.

Post Mortem portrays the specter of dictatorship through the lens of one man's private hell.

With its pale, washed-out colour palette, its eerily slow, almost somnambulist pacing and occasionally bizarre emotional demonstrations, Post Mortem is strangely gripping.

Rather than rushing to determine the cause of death – of love, or of a country -- it stubbornly keeps listening for a heartbeat, even though there may not be one.

Intriguing but understated.

Pablo Larraín employs ultra-widescreen cinematography for constricting close-ups and inhospitably alienating compositions that generate a nasty chill, the director keeping the army's brutality off screen to amplify a sense of oppressive malevolence.

With his sophomore feature, "Tony Manero" (2008), filmmaker Pablo Larraín gave us both a memorably maniacal main character and a black-joke metaphor about the free-floating psychosis wafting through Pinochet's Chile.