A murder awakens a woman’s independence in Chile’s Oscar entry

Raymond Carver’s wonderful story “Neighbors” perfectly evoked the strange out-of-body feeling that can come from inhabiting another person’s house when they are not in it – the temporary thrill of living another person’s life, and the accompanying feeling that there is a life something bigger and brighter than your own. That pain, at once delicious and frightening, colors “In Her Place,” a strange mix of true-crime riffs, domestic melodrama and feminist fable for acclaimed Chilean documentarian Maite Alberdi, who received Oscar nominations for both “The Mole Agent” and “The Eternal Memory” represent an uncomfortable excursion into fiction.

There’s more shared DNA between Alberdi’s latest and her previous documentary work than you might think. In particular, the blend of procedural storytelling, old-school genre tropes, and quirky human comedy that defined the hard-to-classify hybrid “The Mole Agent,” a criminally-themed nursing home study, resurfaces in “In Her Place.” Here, the fictional protagonist Mercedes (Elisa Zulueta), a mousy working mother and secretary to a high-ranking judge in 1950s Santiago, begins curious private investigations while the court is busy with a sensational murder trial.

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The defendant, Maria Carolina Geel (Francisca Lewin), is not fiction: a popular and respected Chilean author who shot her lover in the dining room of the chic Hotel Crillón in the capital on April 14, 1955. The documentary filmmaker in Alberdi is clearly taken by Geel’s story, and she might be too: at first it’s a juicy crime of passion, but what happened next – a controversial minimum sentence of three years, a presidential sentence even more fascinating is that Geel wrote and published a confessional autofiction while incarcerated. In its own right, this is rich footage, even if it never yields satisfying dramatic results when viewed through the eyes of an imaginary admirer: Mercedes functions more as a stand-in for the filmmaker’s allure than as a compelling character in her own right.

The film’s opening scenes establish Mercedes as a tirelessly multitasking factotum to virtually all the men in her life: her bumbling, neglectful husband Efrain (Pablo Macaya), who runs a portrait photography business out of their cramped apartment; her two idle adult sons, too dependent on her household duties to leave the nest; and her boss, who is highly valued in his professional environment but is missing at sea without her extremely efficient administrative support, ranging from expert paperwork to simple tasks. However, such a monotonous task unexpectedly unearths more tantalizing revelations – when she is sent to Geel’s apartment to pick up some clothes for the accused while she is taken to a monastery outside the city.

No wonder the glamorous, wealthy writer’s home is everything the downtrodden paralegal is not: spacious, luxuriously furnished, dotted with high fashion and elegant ornaments and, most alluringly to the suffocated Mercedes, completely uninhabited. Since she was entrusted with the apartment keys in a somewhat unlikely way, she keeps making visits: initially in her usual selfless manner to water the plants and keep things tidy, but eventually a more selfish curiosity takes over. As she revels in the peculiarities of Geel’s lifestyle—reading her books, sleeping in her spacious bed, trying on her expensive fancy clothes, and even wearing them to work—the apartment becomes a refuge from everything that is domestically, politically, and existentially imperfect about Mercedes is. Life. At least within these walls, she can be the independent, confident woman she’s always dreamed of being.

This is a promising setting for the kind of Hitchcockian psychodrama – all doubled-up and unsettling – that’s also heightened by the film’s slightly over-the-top visual style, as Sergio Armstrong’s gauzy cinematography, Rodrigo Bazae’s Nieto’s glossy production design and Muriel Parra’s wrinkle-free costumes all work for it A kind of daylight noir aesthetic that supports Mercedes’ escape fantasies. (The harsh digital glare of the lens undermines the illusion a little, but she doesn’t know that.) There’s also biting humor in the fact that this woman’s liberation is made possible entirely by the hasty murder of a man.

But a strangely handicapped script by Inés Bortagaray and Paloma Salas holds back on any darker, more penetrating possibilities, as does Zulueta’s radiant, ever-courageous performance: Mercedes’ interest always remains on the healthy side of obsession, her double life bringing no significant consequences , and fiction never intrudes provocatively on reality. “In Her Place” – Chile’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar this year – finally resembles a clever short film premise centered around an untapped subject for a full-length documentary or biopic: Mercedes’ self-realization arc notwithstanding Geel’s story, which we are still thinking about, not hers.

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