The Headless Woman

The title deliberately evokes a B-movie ghoul-fest, but celebrated young Argentine director Lucrecia Martel delivers horror of a subtler sort, a dissociation of personality much realer and more common than gory decapitation. Maria Onetto carries the film as the title character, a well-off dentist who hits something in the road as she reaches for her cellphone. She bangs her head as she lurches to a stop. Slowly she gathers herself, looks in the review mirror and sees something, starts to get out but then drives on. We next see her getting a head x-ray at the hospital, and falling asleep repeatedly, seemingly either aphasic or amnesiac, at any rate a complete stranger in her own life. Her disorientation is ours, as together we try to make sense of an unknown world of relationships -- familial, social, economic, racial. Gradually her situation comes into focus, and she resumes her identity or some semblance of it, while her moral quandary plays out. If you’re willing to work at it, this is an engrossing mystery of psychological and sociological depth, but does take patience and attention even at its modest 87-minute length. Though not widely noticed, this film ranked highly in critics’ polls for best of 2009 -- #2 for Film Comment and #6 for indieWire. (2009, dvd.) *7* (MC-81.)