The pictures tell the story — and you better not blink — when Veronica (the superb Maria Onetto) hits something on the road home. But what? She is too traumatized, or panic-stricken, to go back and look, and her fears are too terrible to acknowledge. But she can’t quite carry on as before either. Lucretia Martel (Zama) watches this woman — a sophisticated, upper-middle class dentist and wife — unravel, while those around remain virtually oblivious. It’s slow, subtle and enigmatic but we’re in the hands of master. The title is metaphoric but make no mistake, this is a film about invisibility. Sit back, watch and wonder.
One of the great films of the decade, Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman induces a mesmeric state akin to that of its dazed eponym, tempting the audience to drift, like her, through the narrative’s proliferating mysteries. Trance film, ghost story, and political allegory, the impossibly dense and allusive Headless inlays every image with enigma so that its simple tale of a woman seized by the belief that she has committed a crime takes on an air of epistemological riddle. […] Headless records the power of the privileged to control information, to craft the “master narrative,” and the film’s unnerving aura of expunction recalls—as does the gardener’s unearthing of evidence of a previous existence in Vero’s garden—Argentina’s still suppurating recent past, in which the country’s elites had tens of thousands “disappeared” and let silence efface their crimes.
James Quandt, Artforum
It is a masterly, disturbing and deeply mysterious film… the potency with which it resonates in the imagination is remarkable.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
A full appreciation of Lucrecia Martel’s elegant, rain-soaked film requires the concentration and eye for detail of a forensic detective. Every frame of this brilliant, maddeningly enigmatic puzzle of a movie contains crucial information, much of it glimpsed on the periphery and sometimes passing so quickly you barely have time to blink. The more closely you study The Headless Woman, the deeper and more unsettling are its mysteries.
Stephen Holden, New York Times
Lucrecia Martel
Verónica María Onetto, Josefina Claudia Cantero, Candita Inés Efron
Argentina
2008
In Spanish with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits
Producer
Pedro Almodóvar, Agustín Almodóvar, Esther García
Screenwriter
Lucrecia Martel
Cinematography
Barbara Alvarez
Editor
Miguel Schverdfinger
Original Music
Roberta Ainstein
Art Director
María Eugenia Sueiro
Also in This Series
These movies speak to our times and push the boundaries of the art form — the true modern classics we’re confident will withstand the test of time.
In the Mood for Love
Wong Kar-wai's most acclaimed and popular film is a love story about two neighbours (Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung) who are drawn together by the long absences of their respective spouses + a newly released short companion piece from 2001.
Paprika
A device capable of transmitting dreams falls into the wrong hands in this dazzling anime meta-movie from visionary filmmaker Satoshi Kon. The imagery here is never less than overwhelming; it's probably the greatest scifi movie of our times.
Certain Women
Spare, incisive portraits of four Montana women (Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone) brushing up against the everyday wears and tears of difficult men, their own circumstances, and the desire for something better.
Melancholia
Lars von Trier squares up to the end times with this grandly luxuriant but surprisingly punky sci-fi, set in an imposing country mansion house, where Justine (Kirsten Dunst) blows up what's supposed to be the happiest day of her life.
Moonlight
Moonlight is many things -- a portrait of a young black man coming of age in Miami in the 1980s, a film about fathers and sons, about mentorship and about the scourge of drugs -- but it is also one of the most piercing movie romances of the last decade.
Lady Bird
Greta Gerwig's first film as writer-director is a delightful, painful comedy about "Lady Bird" McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), a Sacramento teen on the point of swapping high school for college, and her hard-working mom, Marion (Laurie Metcalf).
Silence
This sober, probing examination of faith, ego, cruelty and compassion is the most underrated film from the often under-valued latter half of Martin Scorsese's brilliant career; a passion project, about Catholic missionaries in 17th Century Japan.
Synecdoche, New York
Charlie Kaufman wrote Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- all great, all successful -- then turned director with Synecdoche, which is a masterpiece and which basically went unseen. It's overdue rediscovery.