Los Naufragos

This extraordinary dark and poetic movie is about a man who returns home to Chile after 20 years and finds himself in the cold grip of his own maddening ghost story. Littín layers his descent into the maelstrom in a series of scenes akin to Dante's Divine Comedy retold by Edgar Allan Poe: all the people the man encounters (old lovers, household retainers, his brother, who have stayed through the hurricane) reflect through a glass darkly his own guilt and despair. Here there's no boundary between the real and the imaginary. Hans Burmann's evocative camerawork suffuses the film in smoky mists and indelible images that achieve the same eery, alienating quality that Edmond Richard's did in Welles' The Trial. Except for the over-allegorical ending, it's a work of considerable power and originality.