The Headless Woman (2008 film)

The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza / La mujer rubia) is a 2008 Argentine psychological thriller art film written and directed by Lucrecia Martel and starring María Onetto. The plot revolves around Vero (short for Verónica) (Onetto), who hits something while driving on a deserted road near Salta. Not being sure if she has hit a person or an animal, she drives off, and becomes increasingly mentally disturbed.

The film premiered in competition at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival on May 21, 2008. It opened nationwide on August 21, 2008, after being screened at the Locarno International Film Festival earlier that month. While The Headless Woman was mostly lauded by critics for its cinematography and social commentary, others were critical towards the film's slow pace and lack of clear narrative. In 2016, the film was ranked No. 89th on BBC's list of the 100 greatest films of the 21st century. In 2022, it was selected as the 24th greatest film of Argentine cinema in a poll organized in 2022 by the specialized magazines La vida útil, Taipei and La tierra quema, which was presented at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival.

Plot
This film is centered around Verónica ("Vero"), an Argentine bourgeois woman, and how her life slowly twists out of control after she thinks perhaps she struck and killed a person with her car. As Vero is driving, she is distracted by her cell phone and, as she looks down to answer it, her car hits something. She peers in the rear-view mirror, collects herself, and drives away. A non-point-of-view shot of Véro driving away from the scene shows a dog lying dead on the ground.

Although Vero seems indifferent about the situation, it is clear that the incident deeply disturbs her. She acts clumsy and out of place. When she informs her husband Marcos that she thinks she may have run over someone, she insists upon returning to the scene of the accident; they see something on the side of the road, which her husband insists is merely a dog, though Vero is even more unsure than before. Later, the body of a dark-skinned servant's child is recovered from a canal, right above the spot where the accident occurred. Her niece Candita, who has a crush on Vero, tells her that she wants to know more about "that boy who was murdered," but Vero insists that the boy was drowned: "The papers say he was drowned."

Still privately unconvinced, in an attempt to jog back her memory after the accident, Vero revisits a hospital where she had X-rays taken and a hotel where she had a post-accident tryst with her lover Juan Manuel. She discovers that there are no records of her visits to a hospital (perhaps scrubbed by her brother, who works there) and the hotel where she stayed (perhaps scrubbed by Juan Manuel). Finally, she attends a bourgeois party in a hotel, smiling weakly and dazedly as people enter in and out of the busy frame.

Cast

 * María Onetto as Verónica ("Vero")
 * Claudia Cantero as Josefina
 * César Bordón as Marcos
 * Daniel Genoud as Juan Manuel
 * Guillermo Arengo as Marcelo
 * Inés Efron as Candita
 * Alicia Muxo as Prima Rosita
 * Pía Uribelarrea as Prima Tere
 * María Vaner as Tía Lala

Critical response
The Headless Woman garnered mostly positive reviews from film critics. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 75% approval rating based on 52 reviews, with a rating average of 6.89 out of 10. The site's consensus states: "Careful and slight, Lucretia Martel's Headless Woman doesn't fit neatly into a clear storyline, but supports itself with ethereal visuals." At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 0–100 reviews from film critics, the film has a score of 81 based on 12 reviews, classified as a universally acclaimed film.

Accolades
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