Too Late to Die Young

In Too Late to Die Young, Chilean writer-director Dominga Sotomayor excavates details from her own memory to unlock a hidden bonus level of starkly original cinematic beauty. This spare coming-of-age story is a slow-burning stunner, despite hardly having a plot at all.

Even as it borrows a few beats and riffs from the coming-of-age drama (and from Sotomayor’s own childhood), Too Late to Die Young is marked by a fascinating open-endedness, a strange and intriguing reticence as to who and what it’s really about.

It’s an impressive illustration of a director in command of the medium, but more than that, points to the potential in whatever she does next.

A saga of complicated relationships, longings and heartbreak sometimes strains to fully develop all its disparate elements. Yet this is still an ambitious feat of storytelling delivered with a sensitivity to mood and emotion.

Perhaps the bigger canvas here is a native daughter’s tribute to the resiliency of the people of her homeland. It’s no coincidence that the mascot chicken in this rustic Utopia is named Survive.

Too Late to Die Young is above all an achievement in mood and implication. Sotomayor has a way of structuring scenes and composing images that makes everything perfectly clear but not obvious.

Castillo’s talent for spiritually attuned atmospherics could be her USP among Chile’s current crop of directors with idiosyncratic slants on their country’s recent past.