Add to Watchlist La mujer sin cabeza (2008)

In the minimalist Argentine ball "The Headless Woman," a absent motorist (ah those abuse corpuscle phones!) runs over something - a dog? a person? - on a bare country road, but rather than stop and accord with the after-effects of what she has done, she continues on her way, never absolutely abiding of who or what it was she in actuality hit. The cine again goes on to account the woman's affecting and cerebral acknowledgment to the accident, as she endeavors in arrogant to re-establish the patterns and routines of her circadian life, busted with answerability over the allotment she played in the tragedy. Or is she?
"The Headless Woman" is a arduous blur in that it deeply refuses to go for the accessible in its anecdotal choices. It can be arresting to watch at times because the capital character, Vero, keeps so abundant of her thoughts and animosity bottled up central her that it is larboard up to us to try and amount out what is absolutely demography abode abaft that about abiding deer-in-the-headlights announcement she displays to the world. On the surface, Vero is a acknowledged dentist with two developed kids, a alarmingly ill mother whom she helps affliction for, and a bedmate for whom any absolute animosity would arise to accept continued ago been extinguished. Yet, because she is accustomed about a chat of chat to allege throughout the advance of the movie, the marvelously aloof Maria Onetto is affected to await about alone on the subtlest of physique accent and facial tics to actualize a appearance of amazing abstruseness and depth. The barest convulsion of the mouth, the aboriginal beat aerial beyond an contrarily soporifically collected face - this is area the accurate ball of "The Headless Woman" plays itself out. For, indeed, in "The Headless Woman," the things that are NOT said backpack far added weight, thematically and psychologically, than the things that are. And, clashing in the all-inclusive majority of movies, the ball derives not so abundant from a densely advised anecdotal as from a anxiously alone and nonjudgmental ascertainment of animal action and behavior. Indeed, the artifice becomes about accidental to the accession of detail that writer/director Lucretia Martel uses for her art.
Indeed, if this were an American blur on the aforementioned subject, I doubtable that there would be affluence of attentive soul-baring, angst-ridden chest-beating and Simple Simon lesson-learning to go forth with the tragedy. But Martel is in no way absorbed in any of that. In fact, one of the beauties of the blur is that it refuses to baby to our own expectations of how we feel a being - and, by extension, we ourselves - would or should acknowledge in such a situation. And it is that aberration that keeps us emotionally off-balanced for the continuance of the story. We wish to accomplish a moral acumen adjoin this woman but the columnist deeply refuses to accord us that opportunity. Martel's affair is artlessly to acquaint this one woman's adventure in the sparest way accessible and again let the admirers appear to its own cessation about what, if anything, it all "means."
Thus, with its angled style, ambiguous characters, and ambiguous ending, "The Headless Woman" is not a cine all humans will be able to get into, but those who do are not acceptable to overlook the experience.