Critics reviews

I chose this one because of the feeling I get in sharing in a genius-like intelligence; it makes me understand how a viewer can participate in true genius. That gives me vertigo. This incredible intelligence is revealed by certain images and details so that it sparks your desire to look beyond, to look deeper, to follow certain signs.

One of the most distinctive directorial debuts in cinema, standing alongside CITIZEN KANE, BREATHLESS, THE THIRD PART OF THE NIGHT, and SWEETIE. Every shot announces a fully developed authorial voice and a mastery over the medium—there was never anything quite like it before, and even Lucrecia Martel’s subsequent films don’t repeat its singular power.

A blackly funny portrayal of middle-class self-absorption—of a people so wrapped up in themselves they cannot see that their clothes are dirty, the walls are peeling and the pool is a bacterial broth.

La Ciénaga is reportedly autobiographical, and it's entirely possible that it accurately represents Martel's memories of her own family; nonetheless, her concerns are so conspicuous, resting right on the film's surface, that they leave little room for the viewer to do anything other than mutter "tsk, tsk." The mystery that permeates her later work is absent.

With only three features (The Holy Girl and The Headless Woman are her follow ups), Martel quickly established herself as one of the most radical narrative filmmakers working today. If you only watch the first four minutes of her debut work, a darkly comic vision of a bourgeoisie family, it is immediately apparent how brazenly exciting her methods are, creating her own cinematic language to teach us how and what to watch.

It is a masterpiece of singular maturity, evincing none of the missteps that often plague first works; there's no clumsiness or vacillation or insecurity in these images. La Ciénaga announces a body of work that, from the beginning, has radiated a rare perfection.

On paper, all of this sounds like a work of social realism, albeit of the satiric variety, but Martel uses her debut to introduce a number of visual tics that lend the film an idiosyncratic edge. Like Bresson and Kiarostami, she employs ambient noise to triangulate off-screen space, but she also heightens rainforest sounds and dripping water to the point that it becomes a kind of torture, communicating dread more than simple place.

La Ciénaga is a horror film in a way, though it is as inscrutable as the work of Claire Denis, as biting as that of Luis Buñuel, and as rich and unmistakably stamped with an undercurrent of discomfort as Martel's own films La Niña Santa (The Holy Girl, 2004) and La Mujer sin Cabeza (The Headless Woman, 2008).

In La Cienaga, like The Holy Girl and The Headless Woman, Martel constructs a subtly devastating narrative firmly rooted in a specific sense of place—where history does, indeed, repeat itself, continually and hopelessly, and redemption is an impossibility.

Martel dispenses with the niceties of exposition, throwing us into this morass of frustration and anger, and leaving us, like the characters, to figure out on our own who's doing what to whom and who's to be trusted or not. The characters may not always be clearly delineated, but the ambience is detailed and rich.

This astonishing 2001 debut by Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel (The Holy Girl) manages to sustain tension and anxiety throughout... This has the power of great literature, and it's remarkably assured in its juggling of two large families. Every shot is dense with life, with children and animals running in and out, yet the movie is highly focused, a small masterpiece.

Lucrecia Martel's La Ciénaga is a stunning affront to bourgeois complacency... A deceptively simple tale, La Ciénaga is an evocation of willingly allowing oneself (and one's country) to go to seed.