AFI Latin American Film Festival 2009

The latest film from Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel (THE SWAMP, THE HOLY GIRL) concerns a traffic accident on a backwoods road that killed a local boy, an accident which well-to-do Verónica may or may not have been involved in, and may or may not have realized even happened at the time. Martel’s film explores several themes common in her work—class consciousness, particularly from the perspective of a decrepit and downwardly mobile haut bourgeoisie, guilt and culpability, and a taste for secrecy—here given a surreal and near-obsessive exorcising in the performance by María Onetto as Verónica, whose ruminative monologues dominate the picture.