Eliseo is a talented composer. A work of his, Rapsodia Macabra = Macabre Rhapsody (!) has been associated with two traumatic incidents in his life and the shock has unhinged him. He has destroyed part of the score and is interned in a mental institution. Ricardo, an opportunist, dishonest musician is trying to rescue the missing parts of the Rapsodia to present the work as his own.

The problem is, Ricardo's quest is described in a series of disjointed and often incoherent happenings, with secondary characters that add nothing to the tale. The worst parts are perhaps the episode of the floating platform, which makes one suspect that the movie has switched to the black comedy genre, and the ending, where melodrama explodes with megaton force. Good actors are not given a chance. Gaston Pauls as Ricardo is constrained to play a villain/sleaze from Central Casting and Benjamín Vicuña as Eliseo is forced to emote endlessly; he doesn't get a single lighthearted line. And last but not least, we get to hear parts of the Rapsodia Macabra with the inevitable outcome: why the fuss about this?

Fortunately, this mess was not career-ending for director Pablo Larrain. He went on to direct a string of good movies, the best perhaps The Club (2015) with Post Mortem (2010),No (2012) and Neruda (2016) following close behind in quality. Even his Hollywood movie Jackie (2016) was solid. So, if this was your first Larrain movie, don't give up; the others are also in the streaming services.

This is a great movie! The story is very good structured, parts of the story are always in a perfect mixture with the present happenings. The actors are good and the music is strange. There are some really great scenes, and this movie has everything: love, hatred, passion, pianos, aggression, music, violence and a great plot. The only thing is, that I don't understand people who really dislike this movie, some of them have written bad reviews, but I'm glad that I watched it anyway...probably those people didn't really understand the movie and those hidden messages. I will never forget the tension which this movie built up, I can only suggest everyone(who like psychological movies) tho watch it.

Larrain shows considerable dash in this first feature about a traumatized young composer, Eliseo Montalbán (Benjamín Vicuña),whose memory of seeing his sister raped and murdered (over a piano) when he was a child is reawakened when the mysterious death of his female piano soloist during the premiere of his symphony leads him into madness. He disappears into an institution, till a mediocre musician, Ricardo Coppa(Gastón Pauls),trying to reconstruct his lost composition from writing on the sanatorium walls hidden under wallpaper, finds him, now working as a fisherman.

"Everything in this co-production between Argentina and Chile is preposterous and unbelievable," a Latin American reviewer wrote. Yet in spite of the far fetched and melodramatic elements of the screenplay Larrain directs with conviction. The adult Eliseo (lovely name) appears crazy from the start, and Vicuña has presence though he alternates between poetical suffering and merely vacuousness. One believes in Eliseo because everybody else does but when he has his breakdown and massacres six grand pianos with an ax things become a little too bizarre. (Flashbacks to his childhood are well done; the boy actor too has a strong presence.)

In spite of the far fetched and melodramatic elements of the screenplay Larrain directs with conviction. The adult Eliseo (lovely name) appears crazy from the start, and Vicuña has presence though he alternates between poetical suffering and merely vacuousness. One believes in Eliseo because everybody else does but when he has his breakdown and massacres six grand pianos with an ax things become a little too bizarre. (Flashbacks to his childhood are well done; the boy actor too has a strong presence.) Larrain doesn't have as good material to work with here as he was to have in 'Tony Manero,' either in terms of a central character or in the way of a socio-historical world with rich and disturbing overtones. This seems a little like something Francis Ford Coppola might have recently done -- but the doomed Italian family in Buenos Aires of Coppola's 'Tetro' is a much richer mix than Eliseo and his privileged parents, and the intermingling of Chilean and Argentinian elements and characters seems unconvincing to South American viewers and confusing to North American ones.

The title plays with the double meaning of the word "fuga" as both the musical form of the fugue, and "flight", since Eliseo goes into a flight from his traumas and his madness. But I guess that isn't any more profound than any other aspects of the screenplay.

Still, the element already there that was to flower in 'Tony Manero' is the ability Larrain has to delve into an utterly doomed, deranged world with unswerving focus and conviction. It just means so much more in the second film than in this polished but relatively empty debut.