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. 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 tak.