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.

In 1976 it is three years since the Chilean military coup that brought to power Augusto Pinochet. Carmen is an elegant, middle-aged woman living a comfortable middle-class existence: her husband is a doctor in the city, while Carmen herself remodels the family's seaside holiday home and does good works such as reading to the blind. One day the local priest approaches her: he has taken in a young man who was shot fleeing from Pinochet's forces; can Carmen, with her Red Cross training, provide assistance? Thus begins an adventure involving secrets, suspicion and frankly ridiculous code words ("Do you know where I can buy pasta?" "No, but they told me you can get guitars around the corner").

In this kind of film, a middle-aged woman makes for an unusual heroine and Aline Küppenheim gives Carmen a good sense of genteel bewilderment as she gets carried away by events far bigger than she. But the film feels slightly disjointed, almost as if it were originally devised as a series of webisodes which were stitched together into a wider film (Carmen fails to persuade someone - I think her son - to provide drugs in a sequence that is never mentioned again; Carmen goes to meet a contact who does not turn up in a sequence that is never mentioned again; Carmen loses her grandchildren in the woods in a sequence... you get the idea). I would certainly recommend seeing the film, but do not expect the 'taut thriller' promised by the 2022 London Film Festival programme.

What should have been a tense, claustrophobic look at life in 1976 Chile shortly after the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende administration and the imposition of the hard-line Pinochet regime is, unfortunately, a watered-down, meandering, unfocused tale that never fully attains its goal. Writer-director Manuela Martelli's story of a middle-aged doctor's wife who risks her own safety to care for a wounded insurgent in hiding never really catches traction, filling its narrative with endless, unexplained, underdeveloped plot incidents and a woeful lack of character development, including that of the protagonist, whose motivations are never adequately explained but merely hinted at with such subtlety as to be virtually meaningless. By the time viewers reach the film's end, they're more left with an unsatisfying "Oh" rather than a throat-clutching "a ha!" A true disappointment given the subject matter this production had to work with.