‘In Her Place’ Review: A Murder Case Awakens a Woman’s Independence in Chile’s Oscar Entry

The wonderful Raymond Carver story “Neighbors” perfectly evoked the strange out-of-body feeling that can come from occupying another person’s home when they’re not in it — the transient thrill of living someone else’s life, and the accompanying sense that it’s a little bigger and brighter than your own. 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.”

There’s more shared DNA than you might think between Alberdi’s latest and her previous documentary work. 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.

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The accused, Maria Carolina Geel (Francisca Lewin), is not fictional: A popular and well-regarded Chilean author, she shot her lover dead in the dining room of the capital’s swanky Hotel Crillón on April 14, 1955. The documentarian in Alberdi is obviously taken with Geel’s story, as well she might be: It’s a juicy crime of passion to begin with, but what happened afterwards — a controversially minimal three-year sentence, a presidential pardon before it was fully served, and Geel’s writing and publication of a confessional autofiction while incarcerated — is more intriguing still. This is rich film fodder on its own, though framing it through the eyes of an imagined admirer never yields satisfying dramatic results: Mercedes functions more as a proxy for the filmmaker’s fascination than as a compelling character in her own right.

The film’s opening scenes establish Mercedes as a tirelessly multitasking factotum to pretty much all the men in her life: her bumbling, negligent husband Efrain (Pablo Macaya), who runs a portrait photography business from their cramped apartment; her two idle adult sons, too dependent on her housekeeping to leave the nest; and her boss, much admired in his professional sphere, but at sea without her endlessly efficient administrative support, which runs the gamut from expert paperwork to menial chores. One such drab task, however, unexpectedly unlocks more enticing revelations — when she’s dispatched to Geel’s apartment to pick up some clothes for the defendant while she’s remanded to an out-of-town convent.

No surprise that the glamorous, well-off writer’s home is everything that the downtrodden paralegal’s is not: spacious, plushly furnished, strewn with high fashion and elegant ornaments, and, most alluringly of all to the suffocated Mercedes, completely unoccupied. With the apartment keys somewhat improbably entrusted to her care, she makes repeat visits: at first, in her usual selfless mode, to water the plants and keep things tidy, but eventually more self-serving curiosity takes over. As she luxuriates in the trappings of Geel’s lifestyle — reading her books, sleeping in her sprawling bed, trying on her expensively chic clothes and even wearing them to work — the flat becomes a refuge from everything that’s domestically, politically and existentially imperfect about Mercedes’ life. Within these walls, at least, she can be the independent, empowered woman’s she always dreamed of being.

This is a promising setup for the kind of Hitchcockian psychodrama — all doubling and troubling — that is also teased by the film’s slightly heightened visual styling, as Sergio Armstrong’s gauzy cinematography, Rodrigo Bazaes Nieto’s gleaming production design and Muriel Parra’s creaseless costumes all shoot for a kind of daylight noir aesthetic that supports Mercedes’ escapist fantasies. (The hard digital sheen of the lensing slightly undercuts the illusion, but she doesn’t know that.) There’s mordant wit, too, in the fact that this woman’s liberation is wholly enabled by a man’s rash murder.

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. “In Her Place” — Chile’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar this year — finally resembles a nifty short-film premise wrapped around an untapped subject for a full-scale documentary or biopic: Notwithstanding Mercedes’ arc of self-realization, it’s Geel’s story we’re left thinking about, not hers.