The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“One of the great films of the decade … Trance film, ghost story, and political allegory, the impossibly dense and allusive Headless inlays every image with enigma.”

James Quandt, Artforum

“The work of a genius, or at very least one of the most talented filmmakers in the world” (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian), The Headless Woman is the mesmerizing third feature by Lucrecia Martel—and more than likely her chef d’oeuvre. María Onetto plays Verónica, a middle-aged, bottle-blonde dentist in Argentina’s Salta province who may or may not have struck and killed something—or someone—while driving home. Verónica bangs her head in the process and spends the film in a woozy, concussive state while the men in her pampered, privileged family apparently collude to erase all traces of the accident. The dreamy hyperreality and moody, mysterious metaphysics have drawn comparisons to Luis Buñuel, David Lynch, the Michael Haneke of Caché, and the Michelangelo Antonioni of L’avventura and Blow Up. The Indigenous bodies haunting the edges of the frame suggest a deeper meditation on colonial guilt is afoot.

In Spanish with English subtitles

“Every frame of this brilliant, maddeningly enigmatic puzzle of a movie contains crucial information … The more closely you study The Headless Woman, the deeper and more unsettling are its mysteries.”

Stephen Holden, The New York Times

“In what could be one of the greatest films ever made about the emotional realities of a damaged mind, this giddily disorientating latest from Lucrecia Martel is a work of frenzied genius.”

David Jenkins, Time Out