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‘In Her Place’ Review: A Murder Case Awakens a Woman’s Independence in Chile’s Oscar Entry
Docmaker Maite Alberdi makes a surprisingly awkward transition to fiction with 'In Her Place,' this year's Chilean Oscar submission.
That pang, at once delicious and dismaying, colors “ In Her Place,” a peculiar mixture of true-crime riff, domestic melodrama and feminist fable that marks an uneasy venture into fiction for celebrated Chilean docmaker Maite Alberdi, who landed Oscar nominations for both “The Mole Agent” and “The Eternal Memory.” In particular, the mixture of procedural storytelling, old-school genre tropes and whimsical human comedy that shaped the hard-to-classify hybrid “The Mole Agent,” a whodunnit-fashioned nursing home study, surfaces again in “In Her Place.” Here, fictional protagonist Mercedes (Elisa Zulueta), a mousy working mother and a secretary to a senior judge in 1950s Santiago, embarks on some nosy private investigation as the court is consumed with a high-profile murder trial. But an oddly stymied script by Inés Bortagaray and Paloma Salas holds back on any darker, more penetrating possibilities, as does Zulueta’s bright, perpetually plucky performance: Mercedes’ interest stays consistently on the healthy side of obsession, her double life yields no significant consequences, and fiction never intrudes provocatively into fact.
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