“An intriguing debut that could have used a few more of such emotional beats.”

Nia (Ángela Cano) and Tefa (Luna Gaviria) live in a small place near the river, with seemingly little else to do besides fix each other’s hair and have fun with Nia’s young nephew. Fun and money, that’s all that life is according to Nia. The money, or at least her money, comes from smuggling telephones into a nearby maximum-security prison and having sex with inmates during conjugal visits. The fun part comes from a “Jurassic Park”-like theme and water park that is close by (a surreal Y junction points left to the prison, right to the theme park). Fun costs money though, and Nia coerces Tefa to join in on the smuggling. But for a scantily clad woman, there is only one place to hide a phone, and Tefa is not looking forward to putting it there.

With a narrative so sparse in incident that it feels better suited to a short, even at Meteorite‘s 75-minute runtime, one might overlook the formal qualities and deeper layers in Sebastián Múnera’s fiction debut, eight years after his experimental documentary The Tower (La Torre). As surreal as the theme park may seem, it’s real. Parques Temáticos Hacienda Nápoles is built on the compound of notorious (and now dead) drug lord Pablo Escobar, who is briefly shown in the film in a black-and-white photo. You may remember it from 2024’s Berlin entry Pepe, about a hippopotamus that was part of Escobar’s private menagerie. The lingering dread and threat of violence of the place haunts Meteorite like an evil ghost. It’s notable that, apart from the two prisoners that the film focuses on, all other men in the film are nameless, often also faceless, even if they are the ones puppeteering the women. But even the two on the inside, who we get to know intimately when it comes to their bodies, are given very little identity. One of them, a scrawny older fellow with long grey hair, does seem to depend on Nia emotionally; in their oddly erotic first encounter she holds sway over him. Tefa’s relationship to the other inmate is much less clear. They are shown together early in the film, inside a dank space of moss-encrusted concrete walls, their exalted conversation having the air of a Greek tragedy. It is unclear if this moment is real or a figment of the woman’s imagination. The final scene transports us back into the dimly lit room, clearly not a cell or even the space for conjugal visits, where they have sex on a concrete bed that catches most of the light that is able to enter the room. The scene is somewhat transcendental, furthering the idea that this is the way their encounter plays out in Tefa’s head, but Meteorite is too opaque to provide a clear answer, leaving the audience confused.

The heart of Meteorite lies in its subtle depiction of friendship, trust, and a sense of betrayal, perfectly captured in a wordless exchange of looks between the two women shortly before Tefa’s sexual tryst, when Nia realizes Tefa has not followed her orders. Tefa’s desperate, apologetic look at her friend, and Nia’s glance back, a mixture of disappointment and anger, tell everything in a single, powerful moment. It is an acting highlight in a film where emotions mostly are kept under the surface, and a standout moment for both actresses. Their close-knit friendship has been patiently built up by Múnera until that scene, to the point where an audience may wonder is this is all that there is to the film, but he makes it come crashing down in an instant. Or does he? Because the film’s final shot shows that true friendship means forgiveness. An almost impenetrable film and a tough sit for those without an affinity for slow cinema, Meteorite is an intriguing debut that could have used a few more of such emotional beats.