The Headless Woman
La mujer sin cabeza
Spain, France, Italy, Argentina
2008
87 Min
Color
2.35:1
Spanish
Synopsis
A bourgeois middle-aged dentist named Veronica drives alone on a dirt road, becomes distracted, and runs over something. Immediately she becomes disoriented, unmoored from her identity and reality, like a sleepwalker who’s actually awake. As the week go on, she becomes obsessed with the possibility that she may have killed someone: a young boy whose body is found in a roadside canal. Veronica tries to piece together what happened while her husband systematically erases her tracks. –inbaseline
Director
Lucrecia Martel
Lucrecia Martel was born in Salta, northern Argentina, in 1966. As a teenager she did a good deal of filming of her large family, but she never suspected she would end up studying filmmaking. In 1986 she moved to Buenos Aires to study communication. She made a few short films, among them Rey Muerto (Dead King) which received several international awards.
Between 1995- 1998 she directed documentaries for television and children’s programs with a dark sense of humor and which were widely acclaimed by the Argentine press. In 1999 she received the Sundance+-/ NHK Filmmakers Award for her script La Cienaga (The Swamp) about families in Northern Argentina. —Filmbug
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Displaying 4 of 21 wall posts.
Benjamin C.
4Jan12
Perplexing, simplistic, and haunting, The Headless Woman is the kind of film that fascinates and intrigues me the most. It's a head scratcher that follows a woman who may or may not have killed someone in a hit and run. What I most liked about the film is that is carries a mundane tone, but the events that delicately unfold are all the more disturbing because no one else seems affected by them.
Langston Young
15May11
Beautifully shot, though I don't really know what it is exactly I was looking at. Not as focused as her other films, this one seemed to have been blowing in the wind.
Kerem Soyyılmaz likes this
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Langston Young
9Aug11
Definitely. I had no clue what she was getting at. Completely lost on me. I like her 1st 2 features much better.
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Kerem Soyyılmaz
8Feb12
I' d like to see her other films to have an idea. I won' t give more than *** at the moment.
rowdyman
12Sep10
This enigmatic film gives you very little. After watching it, I read a review in the New York Times that detailed information that as a viewer you just are not party to (how am I to know Vero's tryst is a one-off with a man who is her husband's cousin?) The film starts strong but fizzles into thin air. Perhaps it would be different if I were a Spanish speaking Argentine who understood the coded subtext.
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Fans
Displaying 5 of 321 fans.
Articles
Our roundup of essays and articles on this film.
Cineaste, N1FR, frieze
By David Hudson on August 25, 2010
Cineaste grapples with politics even more than usual in its Fall 2010 issue, n+1's new online film review is unlike any other — in a good
Movie Posters of the Year
By Adrian Curry on January 1, 2010
Since it’s no secret by now that The Girlfriend Experience is my favorite movie poster of the year and since I already selected a few of these
Senses of Cinema, "The White Ribbon," DVDs
By David Hudson on December 30, 2009
It's a busy Wednesday between Christmas and New Year's, with film journals posting new issues, a handful of films opening in theaters and
Topics/Questions/Exercises Of The Week—21 August 2009
By Glenn Kenny on August 21, 2009
A Day In The Death Of James Cameron's Avatar: "I have a feeling this week's cannonball of publicity isn't going to let up until December
The Auteurs Daily: Three Husbands and One Headless Woman
By David Hudson on August 19, 2009
"Like my other films, The Headless Woman doesn't end in the moment that the lights go up, it ends one or two days later," Lucrecia Martel
Dread Desert, Part II: a conversation with Lucrecia Martel
By Daniel Kasman on October 23, 2008
J. Hoberman once said that "to not get Bresson is to not get the idea of motion pictures," and that's a fine assertion (and judgment) and all
Dread Desert, Part I: "The Headless Woman" (Martel, Argentina)
By David Phelps on October 23, 2008
Imagine that we are sitting in an ordinary room. Suddenly we are told that there is a corpse behind a door. In an instant the room we are
Cannes Film Festival, 2008: "The Headless Woman" (Martel, Argentina)
By Daniel Kasman on May 25, 2008
Above: Vero (María Onetto) in one of the film's many emblematic, ghostly uses of foreground and background in its compositions. Argentinian
Lists
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Reviews
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La Mujer sin Cabeza
By Diezmartinez on March 9, 2011
Por angas o por mangas, la obra de la cineasta argentina Lucrecia Martel permanece virtualmente inédita en México. Es cierto que su opera prima La Ciénaga (2001) se presentó en alguna Muestra Internacional… read review
The Headless Woman
By Gino on June 24, 2010
The Headless Woman is under beautiful direction, and is something of a minor masterpiece. It’s incredibly acted by Maria Onetto and the rest of the cast, and I believed every last second of the FIlm… read review
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The Headless Woman (2008)--Middle Class Guilt?
17 posts by 3 people
5 months ago