It could all be desperately somber, especially with the deliberately unspecific conflict evoking any number of real-world state-sponsored atrocities, the tragic tale of Chile’s own “disappeared” chief among them. Due to a sticking door, on their return they overlook one body - that of a young woman, whom the caretaker, despite brutal intimidation tactics, resolves to bury properly, as one last tiny act of remembrance, in defiance of the national mandate for forgetting. But that violence intrudes on this placid kingdom of the dead when government forces, running out of places to hide the bodies of the people they’ve illegally killed, co-opt the near-empty morgue. The old man spends his days tending to the stacked graves, directing the few visitors where they need to go, and chatting with his friends: the raconteur gravedigger (Tomas del Estal) nearing the meaningless milestone of the thousandth body he’s buried, and the morose hearse driver (Manuel Moron) who responds to the political violence happening in town with resigned fatalism.

Oblivion heart of the dead