1976

IN A NUTSHELL: The studio explains that it's set during the early days of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. Chile '76 builds from a quiet character study to a suspense, as it explores one woman's precarious flirtation with political engagement in her country. Carmen (Aline Kuppenheim) leads a sheltered upper-middle-class existence. She heads to her summer house in the off-season to supervise its renovation, while also performing local charitable works through her church. Her husband, children, and grandchildren come back and forth during the winter vacation, bringing reminders of the world beyond. When the family priest asks her to take care of an injured young man he has been sheltering in secret, Carmen is inadvertently drawn into the world of the Chilean political opposition and must face real-world threats she is unprepared to handle, with potentially disastrous consequences for her and her entire family.

THINGS I LIKED: The leading actress, Aline Kuppenheim, is fantastic. I had never seen her in anything before. She does an excellent job navigating the subtle layers that take her into dangerous situations, as she chooses her levels of involvement and considers what consequences her actions might have on her loved ones.

The entire cast did a great job and felt like real people, not actors playing a role. Everything felt very authentic and believable.

The director selected some Interesting camera angles in various scenes to remind us of the different perspectives seen in Chile during that time.

It's always fascinating to spend time in another country. In this film, it's Chile. I love seeing what the houses and food look like. I have a nephew who lived in Chile for a couple of years, and I'd love to go there someday. Of course, the Chile represented in this movie is the 1976 Chile.

We get to spend some time at a lovely beach house. It's always been my dream to live right on the beach like that! When my kids were young, we used to rent a house on the beach for a week. Loved it!

The color palette is muted, which underscores the underground movement occurring in the country at the time.

THINGS I DIDN'T LIKE: It's hard to understand what's going on at first. I hadn't read the movie's synopsis so that I could just walk into this "world" in Chile.

Some of the sound effects were interesting choices but also super annoying. I'm sure they were designed to make the audience feel as uncomfortable as the leading lady was feeling with everything going on around her.

It's difficult to see what's happening in the nighttime scenes when the screen is so dark.

Some viewers will complain that nothing "happens." Not all audiences enjoy watching foreign films with subtitles.

Some viewers won't like the ambivalent ending.

For audiences unfamiliar with Chilean politics, it would have been helpful to see more newspaper headlines or TV announcers explaining the political climate of the day. It would have been interesting to read something on the end screen about what happened in Chile after the events we see in the film unfold.

TIPS FOR PARENTS: Smoking Alcohol A woman takes a lot of pills.

Someone gets seasick and throws up. Bleh.

We see a bloody wound up close.

Some profanity and a woman drops an F-bomb in Spanish.

!

Aline Küppenheim turns in quite an impressive performance here as the middle class woman, married to a doctor, who finds herself embroiled in some clandestine activities at the height of the Pinochet administration in Chile. All she actually wants to do is get their beach house repainted, but when the local priest (Hugo Medina) approaches "Carmen" and asks her to take care of an injured young man, she finds herself exposed to quite a few dangers as she discovers "Elías" (Nicolás Sepúlveda) has a bullet hole in him and is on the run with the police looking for him. Over the next ninety minutes we get quite a sense of the peril in which she has to live; of her nervously sneaking about watching her own every move; telling lies and swapping buses when she travelled - all more akin to something from a John Le Carré novel rather than life in a supposedly civilised 1970s nation. What adds to the effectiveness of this drama is the fact that aside from some television actuality, we see little of the actual oppressiveness of the regime. It's the changes in her behaviour and her attitude to the young "Elías" that subtly embeds the sense of menace throughout the film. I didn't love the soundtrack and some might not like the inconclusiveness of the denouement, but I found that - like life in this turmoil-ridden country itself, made it all the more potent. Worth a watch.

This is a very fine film indeed; perfectly paced, it slowly builds in tension in a subtle, understated, but very real way. Great acting from Aline Küppenheim who steps outside her comfortable bourgeois lifestyle and whose eyes are slowly opened to another country. You watch - there's no need for any overblown scripted dialogue. Some others may think there's too much unexplained - I didn't feel that at all. In a world where there's a necessary conspiracy of silence you become an accomplice in the need to keep quiet. Even her stop in a roadside cafe radiates suspicion and fear. The music is just spot on - at times riffing on 70s cop thrillers and then at times discordantly modern. And the final scenes - without giving anything away: a punch in the stomach and an utterly nauseous aftermath.

Great story with an equally mysterious plot. Carmen visits her house by the big blue to get off of regular life and picks a red paint for walls then tame it with hints of blue. She freezes at screams and her husband gets upset when resistance is called out by a friend in the presence of Carmen. A great story that shows how sacrifices opens the eyes of a sleepwalking masses. Excellent colour tone in visuals and great cinematography capturing expressions well. Unique use of sound effects signaling the tensions kept restrained breaking free. It's a great look at how life was from the outside of recent revolution how social views changed and should change. Excellent.

The film is a stunning portrayal of the inherent, ubiquitous vein of violence in a country experiencing oppression - how it is built into strata of fear and a collusive silence, where everyone has to play a role, rather than be authentic. Every little detail is a description of this experience, a metaphor or picture of how the venom of a violence-based power removes legitimacy from not just government but from the structure of society, even the family itself. The camera work and art direction are exquisite, as is the haunting score and the beautiful costumes. The writing too, elliptical and shorthand helps you grasp the social meanings without ever being heavy-handed. At the end, you feel you can barely breathe from all the tension - much like it must feel to live in a police state.