Melancolía

Over the past few years, as Americans have begun to campaign more effectively for measures to end the violence in their schools, cinema has started to explore the subject in earnest. Earlier in 2021, SXSW award winner The Fallout explored the aftermath of a school shooting from the perspective of a young survivor. Melancolía tells the story of a mother who has lost her child.

Dolores (Alessandra Rosaldo) is a hospice nurse, spending her days caring for people in the last stages of life. It’s a physically strenuous job and also emotionally challenging, but although she cares about her patients, she knows how to set boundaries. In the context of this work she sees a lot of other people’s grief. It’s often expressed in appalling behaviour towards her, which she takes in her stride. She understands how unreasonable the death of a loved one can make people, but, professional as she is, aims to keep her own in check.

School shootings happen so often in the US now that they’re surrounded by protocols. After the classroom drills and the carefully coordinated emergency responses – when the dust has settled – come the support groups, the vigils, the sharing of memories. Dolores doesn’t want any of that. It seems pointless to her, simply reinforcing the awful fact that her daughter is dead. She doesn’t want to talk it over and she doesn’t want to be reassured. She’s angry, unable to understand how, when this keep happening, nothing remotely adequate is being done about it.

Grieving alone, Dolores sometimes imagines that her daughter is there. Though he borrows something from this language of horror films – with his choice of music and camera angles, his use of shadows – writer/director Jorge Xolalpa keeps the special effects simple. There is no need for gore. To envision this girl, shot in the face, is, for Dolores, overwhelming in itself. Her tough daily routine provides relief because it allows her to concentrate on others’ pain, others’ needs instead of her own, but after an encounter with a new patient brings those agonising memories crashing into a previously safe space, she begins to spiral towards crisis.

Xolalpa’s slow, patient character study reveals the ceaseless, grinding effects of a grief which Dolores is unwilling to let go of – the last vital remnant of her maternal love. It’s a tragedy unspooling in an otherwise very ordinary world. In the key scenes, the camera remains still for long periods, allowing no escape from the awareness of what has happened. Raquel Gallego’s cinematography brings out every detail of the domestic spaces that Dolores inhabits at home and at work, giving them all a grey, dismal quality from which it seems impossible to escape. The temptation is to view Dolores in the same light as her patients’ trouble loved ones, but gradually it becomes clear that the real parallel here is with the patients themselves. We are watching a woman dying, slowly consumed from the inside out, as if the bullet that passed through her daughter’s brain were still going about its deadly work.