Dir: Sebastián Múnera | Drama 2026
Meteorite opens with a deliciously strange proposition: two young Colombian women smuggling mobile phones into a prison take a detour through an amusement park built on the former estate of a drug lord. There are water slides, concrete dinosaurs, tropical greenery and, somewhere beyond the gates, a prison. It sounds like the set-up for a lurid thriller. Múnera has something stranger in mind as we soon discover.
The park is the film’s masterstroke. It is Colombia’s past turned into entertainment, violence landscaped and sold back as leisure. The grotesque proximity of pleasure and incarceration gives Meteorite its peculiar charge: everywhere the women look, the country’s history seems to have been repackaged, painted over and left standing in the sun.
At its centre are Tefa and Nia, friends whose lives have narrowed around survival. They are raising Nia’s young nephew in a small town beside the Magdalena River; Tefa dreams of escape and the fantasy of an American future, while Nia draws her into the decidedly less glamorous economics of prison smuggling. Their illegal errand becomes something more psychologically dangerous when the landscape begins to release memories neither woman has quite managed to bury.
Múnera, a visual artist making his fiction feature debut, appears less interested in conventional crime-movie mechanics than in the strange afterlife of violence. The prison is important, but Meteorite is really about what exists outside it: the ordinary lives, desires and friendships that continue in its shadow. The result promises to be less a gangster picture than a tropical ghost story in which the ghosts happen to be political, personal and very much alive.
There is an appealing perversity to the film’s imagery. A theme park on a former narco estate is almost too perfect a metaphor for a country trying to turn traumatic history into tourist attraction. Yet Múnera seems alert to the danger of simply underlining that irony. His interest lies in the contradictions: beauty beside brutality, fantasy beside poverty, escape beside entrapment. The lushness isn’t decoration; it is part of the trap.
The friendship between Tefa and Nia gives the film its emotional heft. Their relationship is threatened not by some conventional villain but by the accumulated pressure of things they cannot afford to say. The suggestion is that friendship, like memory, can become both refuge and prison.
What makes Meteorite particularly intriguing is its refusal to make Colombia’s violence into exotic scenery. Múnera takes a landscape saturated with the imagery of narcotrafficking and asks what happens when people simply have to live there afterwards. The title itself suggests an intrusion from elsewhere — something falling out of the sky and disturbing an already unstable world.
If the film occasionally risks the preciousness that can accompany visually ambitious first features, its conceptual audacity is difficult to dismiss. This is cinema attracted to the uncanny possibilities of real places rather than the familiar machinery of genre. A prison, a pleasure park, a ruined narco empire and two women trying to imagine another life: Múnera has assembled them into an oddly beautiful collision.
Meteorite is all about how difficult it is to erase memories, how nostalgia and the past often take control however much we want to move on with our lives. That makes this Colombian fantasy drama considerably more interesting than its crime-story premise initially suggests.
VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2026