It just takes a few seconds for Vero (María Onetto) to take her eyes off the road when she hits something. But what exactly did she hit? The 2008 Argentine thriller, The Headless Woman, slowly pulls you into one woman’s guilt over a crime she might have committed, and her obsession is right at home among the most essential psychological thrillers. Iconic genre movies like Vertigo and Zodiac dig into the internal lives of its characters as they get themselves caught in mysteries they can’t escape from. Most times, they don’t even want to. The Headless Woman comes from Lucrecia Martel, a famous Argentine filmmaker, who puts her signature arthouse style into the psychological thriller subgenre. But while there is a mystery, don’t expect easy solutions.
‘The Headless Woman’ Is Not a Conventional Thriller
Vero, an Argentine bourgeois woman, drives along a dirt road and suddenly hears her cell phone ring. When she searches for it, those few seconds change everything. She drives into what could be a stray dog, and rather than know for sure, she drives off. Consumed by denial and acceptance, she becomes convinced that it might have been one of the Indigenous boys who played in the area. Like with Martel’s other features, La Ciénaga (2001) or Zama (2017), The Headless Woman is not a plot-heavy film, but don’t let that scare you away. If characters are not losing their sanity in the best psychological thrillers, they are losing control of the world around them. Vero’s story fits right in there as The Headless Woman forces you into her disoriented perspective with a sense of unease when a world that should be familiar becomes stranger.
‘The Headless Woman’ Makes You Feel Vero’s Guilt
Violence strikes without warning in Martel’s films, starting with her debut feature. Martel does this again with The Headless Woman. Although the film’s title seems to promise something more explicit, it withholds it. During the opening scene of the possible hit-and-run, viewers don’t see what Vero drove into, but the collision is felt by how aggressively Vero is bounced around in her seat.
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María Onetto as Vero is a nearly silent performance, relying on body posture and facial expressions to convey the confusion she feels in her surroundings or the urge to forget when a memory of the hit-and-run returns. She wanders through life as if meeting coworkers and relatives for the first time. How she is related to the relatives that enter scenes isn’t explained right away, escalating the disquieting isolation that Vero has locked herself into. The unique cinematography further intensifies the feelings Onetto portrays without words. Camera framing cuts off characters from the neck up when they stand near Vero, creating “headless” figures. Other scenes gain atmosphere through the use of lighting. When Vero is a passenger in a car later on, the scene takes place on a sunny day, but the inside is so dark it turns the characters into silhouettes. The film isn’t solely about this woman’s guilt; it’s a political allegory for director Lucrecia Martel’s own country.
The Hit-And-Run in ‘The Headless Woman’ Represents the Dark History of Argentina
Martel explained in an interview, “In Argentina, my country, I see people that still carry the weight of the really bad stuff that they did not denounce back when it happened under the dictatorship. A lot of people decided they didn’t want to see, they didn’t want to know what was happening. And now the same process is occurring, but it’s in relation to poverty.” The dictatorship she talks about is “the Dirty War,” when Argentina’s military seized control of the country. Under the rule, 30,000 civilians were killed or disappeared, and approximately 500 babies were then stolen from captive prisoners and given to military couples.
In the present day, those affected by severe poverty are the Indigenous community, and Martel connects the discrimination of modern Argentina to its past in Vero’s story. It’s not by mistake that a 1970s song is playing on the radio during the opening hit-and-run. White Argentine characters in Martel’s films overlook their casual racism toward the darker-skinned, Indigenous characters that they come into contact with or employ. After Vero admits her fears of having killed the boy, the men in her family respond by making sure she is safe from the police, never once caring for the life that has been lost.
Vero and her family want to look the other way, even if hinted at by Vero’s sudden grimaces or sobs, that forgetting isn’t so easy. Similar to how Lynne Ramsey’s You Were Never Really Here deconstructs the crime thriller with its portrayal of a traumatized hitman, The Headless Woman challenges audience expectations of what to expect from a psychological thriller. Lucrecia Martel’s arthouse style is disquieting, made even more so by the scathing critique of Argentina that is just beneath the surface.
