The Headless Woman · reception & legacy
2008 · Lucrecia Martel
How The Headless Woman has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
Booed and walked out on at its Cannes 2008 premiere, dismissed by many as wilfully opaque — then steadily reappraised until it became a fixture on best-of-the-21st-century critics' polls and arguably Martel's masterpiece.
What's debated
The eternal fight: is its withholding, out-of-focus obliqueness a profound formal gamble or two hours of nothing happening — with the ambiguity of what Vero hit on that road as the flashpoint.
Its footprint
The image of María Onetto's freshly bleached blonde bob has become shorthand for the whole film, and 'the accident you refuse to look at' has made it a go-to reference for class-guilt allegory in Latin American cinema writing.
Where it stands
A canon climber par excellence — the crown jewel of the New Argentine Cinema for cinephiles, the 'you must sit with this one' entry in Martel's filmography.