Critics reviews

These bloodstained hands rinse too easily; the drama does not lie in their indelible mnemonics, but in the retroactive thrills of remembering the crime at all.

Lucrecia Martel’s films demand your attention to infinitesimal details and then upbraid you—albeit thoughtfully, like a sage imploring you to reconsider all your preconceived notions—for caring too much about them.

Like a dream, it fragments everyday life and reconfigures it so that the pieces don't quite fit, but for that, become defamiliarized, so that everyday gestures suddenly seem new and full of possible, unconfirmed meaning; though the meaning's always terror. And most importantly, like a dream, it's all completely believable. On par with Antonioni, or Dreyer, or Hitchcock, Martel works from real life and abstracts the components she needs to give the natural supernatural connotations.

Though small in scale, The Headless Woman is a showcase for one of the new millennium's most preternaturally gifted filmmakers, and each viewing teases out a bit more of this masterpiece's thematic and aesthetic intricacies.

It's frustrating trying to feel something it's impossible to feel unless you've actually had the experience of killing someone accidentally. But some of us can relate to someone taking care of our problems for us, and we can all relate to recovering from a trauma and finding ways to go on with our lives that often involve willful forgetting. Is that what Hannah Arendt meant when she said that Eichmann had lost the capacity to think? For The Headless Woman, the answer appears to be "yes.

Without being didactic or ideological, The Headless Woman communicates an idea with every shot, dolly, and sound bridge, while eschewing traditional narrativity in refusing establishing shots and transition shots or even camera positions and movement that align us with a single character's perspective.

With its ambiguous middle-aged heroine and its crime-that-may-or-may-not-have-happened, The Headless Woman has echoes of François Ozon’s films with Charlotte Rampling... except Ozon grants us emotional access to the character, in a way that Martel never does.

The Headless Woman is an astonishing movie about an overdetermined and, in that way, highly life-like and familiar situation—at once very local, global, social, and sexual—in which something has gone badly wrong, and the wrongness is compounded by your inability to say exactly what.

The Headless Woman is no wilfully opaque puzzler designed to alienate; Martel is out to confound and bedazzle us, and to worry us too. You'd have to be headless or heartless yourself not to let this extraordinary, eerie film get under your skin.

The potency with which [The Headless Woman] resonates in the imagination is remarkable... Never before has [Martel's style] been applied to something so painful, so relevant, and never before has she delivered such a psychologically real portrait.

Martel expertly compounds ambiguities without ever abandoning the apparent naturalism of her presentation... [Her] film of social divisions and collective forgetfulness is her most overtly political effort yet.

The Headless Woman induces a mesmeric state akin to that of its dazed eponym, tempting the audience to drift, like her, through the narrative’s proliferating mysteries.