Metacritic reviews

Pablo Larrain's breathtaking visual command makes for enthralling viewing in Post Mortem, a rigorous, formally controlled yet emotionally gripping drama set during Chile's bloody 1973 military coup.

Post Mortem portrays the specter of dictatorship through the lens of one man's private hell.

A sometimes shocking, often moving journey through a blood-stained corner of the past. Like Costa Gavras's "Missing" through the eyes of an everyday Chilean.

With its pale, washed-out colour palette, its eerily slow, almost somnambulist pacing and occasionally bizarre emotional demonstrations, Post Mortem is strangely gripping.

This is a chilling portrayal of a deeply unsympathetic protagonist.

Intriguing but understated.

Often drolly, coolly morbid, Post Mortem also operates just as effectively in a more nakedly direct register.

Pablo Larraín employs ultra-widescreen cinematography for constricting close-ups and inhospitably alienating compositions that generate a nasty chill, the director keeping the army's brutality off screen to amplify a sense of oppressive malevolence.

With his sophomore feature, "Tony Manero" (2008), filmmaker Pablo Larraín gave us both a memorably maniacal main character and a black-joke metaphor about the free-floating psychosis wafting through Pinochet's Chile.

The sweep and energy of historical drama are notably missing from this grim, intense, mordantly comic little film.