Post Mortem offers a haunting and almost fantastically apocalyptic vision of Chile's descent into national chaos immediately following the military overthrow of September 11, 1973. Refusing any easy nostalgia for the past, Larraín's extreme attention to those historical details often fetishized in period films- clothing, hairstyle, décor – imparts an unnatural and eerie pallor to early Seventies Santiago as a city floating in a deadly netherworld where the horrors strangely chronicled in the film are made to seem frighteningly inevitable. Tony Manero star Alfredo Castro delivers another unfettered performance as a pathologically lonely, emotionally bankrupt, mortician who increasingly resembles one of the cadavers piled unceremoniously in the devastated streets and everywhere in his overrun hospital. Although Post Mortem glows with a dark unshakable anger over the unthinkable injustice it so brilliantly depicts, the film also aims equally savage caricature at both the blind brutality of the military forces and the untenable utopia of the Socialist revolutionaries.