100
San Francisco Chronicle
Martel's vision is so visually rich and complex it borders on the impressionistic, but The Headless Woman would be nowhere without the precise tour de force performance by Onetto.
The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza)
Critic Rating
(read reviews)User Rating
- Argentina,
- France,
- Italy,
- Spain
- 2008
- · 87m
Director
Lucrecia Martel
Cast
María Onetto,
Claudia Cantero,
César Bordón,
Guillermo Arengo,
Inés Efron,
María Vaner
Genre
Drama,
Mystery,
Thriller
A bourgeois woman named Vero hits something with her car in the dead of night and drives away. Originally indifferent to the situation, she grows increasingly paranoid resulting from her inability to know what she hit exactly, whether it was a person, an animal, or something else.
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What are critics saying?
100
Time Out by Keith Uhlich
No simplistic status parable. It’s more a psychological snapshot of a person forever doomed to remain a voyeur to her own life
100
The New York Times by Stephen Holden
Brilliant, maddeningly enigmatic puzzle of a movie.
100
San Francisco Chronicle by G. Allen Johnson
Martel's vision is so visually rich and complex it borders on the impressionistic, but The Headless Woman would be nowhere without the precise tour de force performance by Onetto.
91
The A.V. Club by Scott Tobias
A remarkably nuanced, ever-evolving performance (María Onetto).
88
Boston Globe by Wesley Morris
This is also the first of Martel’s films to build in a direction other than up. The film’s lateral movement continues a kind of class commentary.
80
Village Voice by J. Hoberman
As dense and fluid as Martel's movie is, the viewer--like the protagonist--is compelled to live in the moment. And a rich moment it is.
80
New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein
Guilt and alienation from Argentina’s Lucrecia Martel, so arty, enervated, and allegorical it might have been made by a European in the early sixties.
80
Empire by Patrick Peters
Slow-paced and self-indulgent in places but a bravely intense use of camera work to explore the internal psychology of the characters.
70
Variety
A simpler and more taut, if slightly less interesting version of the oblique but mesmerizing studies of family life in fetid, hothouse atmospheres the Argentine helmer offered up in "La cienaga" and "The Holy Girl."
70
Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas
Not the supernatural horror picture its title suggests, but this subtle, elliptical film evokes its own kind of nightmarish situation.
70
Variety by Leslie Felperin
A simpler and more taut, if slightly less interesting version of the oblique but mesmerizing studies of family life in fetid, hothouse atmospheres the Argentine helmer offered up in "La cienaga" and "The Holy Girl."
50
Film Threat
As promising as the premise sounds, it cannot rise from the mundane.
25
Christian Science Monitor
The disjointedness of The Headless Woman might be the result of narrative complexity or of directorial ineptitude or (my favorite) of narrative complexity mangled by directorial ineptitude. If the residual fog ever clears, maybe I'll be able to tell you for sure.
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