The Headless Woman

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