The Headless Woman

A film set in northern Argentina. Verónica is a dentist. She is driving back from a family gathering and looks at her phone. She hits something. She stops the car, does not look ahead, sees something in the middle of the road in her mirror, and drives on. What follows is blurred. She goes into a hotel, sits in the rain, goes to a hospital, and tells nobody what happened. Days pass. She talks to people but does not answer; she does not remember names, does not recognise relatives, and gets confused in her own house. Eventually she tells her husband. From there the film turns into a story of cleaning up. The family moves in; the hotel record is deleted, the hospital record disappears, the car is repaired, and the event is removed. What the narrative is interested in is not the accident but class: everyone around her has the power to fix this and nobody asks a question. The missing boy stays at the edge of the narrative. A body is found in a canal and the film never brings it to the centre; that itself is the structure. The form is demanding. The framing is constantly in the wrong place; faces are cut off, whoever is speaking stays in the background, and important information passes in a corner of the image. The sound does the same work. Part of the dialogue cannot be heard and background noise comes forward. The domestic help are always at the edge of the frame. The film builds that as a theme. María Onetto, Claudia Cantero and César Bordón are in the cast. Lucrecia Martel wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes formally demanding films with a political undertext. Who it is not for: anyone looking for clarity; the narrative confirms nothing and some viewers argue about what the film even tells.