As The Meltdown (El Deshielo) begins, vintage news footage reveals the strange-but-true sight of something being lifted out of a frosty sea. It’s a huge chunk of an Antarctic iceberg, on its way to becoming the centerpiece of Chile’s pavilion at the 1992 world’s fair. As a symbol of national ingenuity and know-how, the frosty specimen is kind of out-there. And yet, for a country emerging from 17 years of military rule and determined to redefine itself, it represents an understandable leap of faith. It’s also an apt starting point for a movie in which submerged things come to light, if only briefly — a coming-of-age story where the key lesson is to keep what you know to yourself.

Manuela Martelli’s well-received debut, 1976 (aka Chile ’76), a selection of the 2022 Directors’ Fortnight, took place during Chile’s Pinochet era. The writer-director sets her sophomore feature barely two years after the country shook off the despot’s iron grip. Inés, the lead character, was born in the final years of the dictatorship. A cherub-faced 9-year-old with an old soul, she watches the grown-ups around her calibrate their actions to a shifting world. Truth, she discovers, is less important than the ability to anticipate how people will react to it.

Watchful, precocious and utterly un-cutesy in the compelling performance of Maya O’Rourke, Inés moves freely around her grandparents’ mountain ski lodge while her mother and father are away. It’s not clear whether they’re bureaucrats, scientists, artists or entrepreneurs, but they’re in Spain as members of Chile’s iceberg-delivering delegation at Expo ’92 in Seville. While her grandmother, Techa (Paulina Urrutia), and grandfather, Ricardo (Mauricio Pešutić), are busy entertaining potential investors, Inés basically has the run of the place, a tightly operated and pleasingly dated hotel in a remote corner of the Andes, near a ski lift. Inés is friends with the pair of hardy dogs who oversee the property, and moves easily among the hotel’s employees and, later, when she’s in detective mode, its guest rooms. She hangs with receptionist Sonia (Paula Zúñiga) at the front desk, trades greetings with Sonia’s brother, bartender Genaro (Luis Uribe), and, against Techa’s wishes, slips into the room of housekeeper Paty (Daniela Pino) when she doesn’t want to sleep alone.

Inés becomes fascinated with one of the guests, a German skier about five years her senior. Hanna (Maia Rae Domagala), the only girl on her training team, is also its star, but her dwindling drive frustrates her coach, Alexander (Jakub Gierszal), whose bond with Hanna appears more complicated and troubling each time the screenplay places them together.

Inés approaches the teen with a homemade gift, and despite their age difference, they bond readily, two girls separated from their parents, English their common language. Hanna shares her broody music and dark nail polish, and alludes to strained relations with her single mother, a former skating champion from East Germany or, as Hanna calls it, “a country that doesn’t exist anymore.” German reunification took place within months of Pinochet’s replacement as president, and Martelli’s screenplay is sensitive to a child’s-eye view of dramatic geopolitical events. Wise-beyond-her-years Inés is vaguely aware that a brother of Sonia and Genaro’s is one of Chile’s desaparecidos, assumed murdered by the government.

Exploring the snow-covered mountain, the girls skip stones on its frozen lake and traipse through its defunct military outpost, a piece of land that Inés’ grandparents are determined to sell to a couple from Madrid. With visions of a high-end skiers’ destination and a substantial payday, Techa cautions her granddaughter: “Behave yourself while the Spaniards are here.”

But troubling events intrude on the Spaniards’ visit: One morning, after an eventful evening that includes separate and overlapping interludes with Alexander, Inés and Sebastián (Lautaro Cantillana), Inés’ teenage cousin, Hanna is gone. A disappearance, a far-flung location — it’s a classic plot engine, fueled by upheaval and dark secrets, and given fresh life in this telling. Benjamín Echazarreta’s cinematography is alert to the workaday energy of the hotel as well as the eerie beauty of the setting, with its mix of fairy-tale wonder and bone-deep dread. The discordant, Bernard Herrmann-esque bursts of María Portugal’s rich score ratchet up the suspense and foreboding.

The film’s second half places Inés alongside Hanna’s anguished mother, Lina, brought to anxious, guilt-ridden, ferocious life by Saskia Rosendahl. Excluded from the local authorities’ search for her daughter, Lina conducts her own. A hopeful but guarded Inés rides shotgun with her and serves as translator when necessary, a role that puts her in an uncomfortable and painfully enlightening spot when the official excuses are pathetic or the civilian indifference is acute. Among the various aspects of the movie that its English title refers to, not least is the unhinged rampage Lina unleashes at a couple of schoolgirls, a gringa loca on the razor’s edge.

The movie’s Spanish title could also be translated as The Thaw, as fitting and double-edged as The Meltdown, but with a slightly different slant, as in Lina’s eventual warming to Inés. It’s the kind of motherly attention that should come with a warning label.

Martelli, herself an accomplished actor, has drawn persuasive and involving performances from her international cast. The production design by Nohemí González and Carolina Espina’s costumes are outstanding contributions that never overshadow the action (though the hand-stitched embroidery on one of Inés’ sweaters might break your heart a little with its brightness and innocence).

In a couple of instances, the director overplays her hand. The opening sequence ponders a long, slow swirl of blood down a bathroom sink — from a child’s lost baby tooth, no less — that feels like foreshadowing in overdrive. Later, a long close-up of a shattered glass of milk works neither as visual rhyme with the snowy setting nor dramatic insight. It’s merely distracting.

But these are quibbles when a movie conjures a world as aching and in-between as the one in The Meltdown. Confused connections, parental proxies, colonial histories — Martelli interweaves these narrative strands with skill and artistry. Through the mystery of one person’s fate, a young hero awakens to certain ground rules and discovers a haunted place. You might call it the place of things that “you don’t think about but are still there,” as the story’s unhappy teenager puts it in the journal she’s left behind.