Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 136: Fri May 25

The Headless Woman (Martel, 2008): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 9pm


The Lucretia Martel season (full details here), ahead of the release of her new film 'Zama', continues with this screening of her brilliant and mysterious 2008 movie.

Chicago Reader review:
The gnawing guilt of the hit-and-run driver has been exploited in dramas as various as Susanne Bier's Open Hearts (2002), Terry George's Reservation Road (2007), and Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys (2008), and it proves an effective hook in this unsettling, nicely modulated Argentinian feature by Lucrecia Martel (The Holy Girl). Quiet but commanding, Maria Onetto plays a comfortable middle-class wife who's driving home from a family gathering when she runs over a little boy; the accident transpires in an extended close-up of her from the passenger's seat, and Onetto is masterful as her character absorbs the shock of the impact, gradually composes herself, pointedly refuses to look in her rearview mirrors, and drives on. Of course the crime begins to eat away at her, and Martel, breaking some new ground, shows how the crisis becomes an open secret inside the woman's family, knitting it closer around her.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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