La mujer sin cabeza

The Headless Woman

After hitting something with her car, a bourgeois woman’s life slowly descends into paranoia and isolation, as she fears she may have killed someone

The film is centred round Veró (Maria Onetto) whose life slowly twists out of control after she may or may not have struck a child with her car. As Veró is driving, she is distracted by her mobile phone and, as she looks down to answer it, she hits something. She peers in the rear-view mirror, collects herself, and drives away. We do not see what she has run over; a shot of the scene shows there is indeed a body, but it is unclear whether it is an animal or a person.

Disturbing and deeply mysterious, this tale of ghosts and guilt places the viewer in the same foggy, dislocated frame of mind as its traumatised heroine. Like Verónica, the film glimpses the truth out of the corner of its eye.

Maria Onetto received the Argentinian Film Critics Association award for Best Actress in The Headless Woman.

Director Lucrecia Martel was born in 1966 in Salta, Argentina.
One of seven brothers and sisters, she said of her home “there was a very deep devotion to storytelling”. Martel directed a number of short films between 1988 and 1994, winning best short film at the 1995 Havana Film Festival for Rey Muerto (Dead King). Her debut feature, La Cienaga, (2001) received several international awards and was voted greatest Latin American film of the decade in a poll of New York film critics, programmers, and industry professionals. The Headless Woman was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2008.

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