2008’s The Headless Woman is the kind of thoroughly inscrutable arthouse film that poses even the meaning of its title as a riddle. Is Maria Onetto’s protagonist-in-crisis “headless” in the “Where’s your head at?” sense? The film is a week-in-the-life portrait of a wealthy Argentine woman who we never truly get to know, because by the time we meet her she’s not quite acting like herself; she goes through the motions of her usual daily schedule, but her mind is elsewhere. Is her titular headlessness a reference to director Lucrecia Martel’s tendency to push her characters to the furthest edges of the frame? We often see Onetto’s figure literally headless, as she is cropped & contorted so that her face is obscured from our eyes. My favorite, most baseless theory is that the title is a slight mistranslation from a Spanish-language idiom meaning The Concussed Woman, as that is our POV character’s least questionable condition. She has a head; she just smacks it really hard in a car accident, leaving her dazed for days on end as she stubbornly refuses medical diagnoses from both doctors in the film and the audience in the theater.

Besides the figurative opaqueness of its title, another common arthouse complaint that The Headless Woman invites is that “Nothing happens.” That would ring especially true for anyone who arrives late to the theater, since exactly one thing happens in the first few minutes, and if you miss it you’re fucked. The film opens with indigenous children playing in the canals off a service road, followed by a sequence of a white Argentine aristocrat (Onetto) driving recklessly down the same dusty path. She hits something with her car while reaching for her cellphone, but instead of stepping out to investigate what it was, she momentarily pauses then drives away — concussed and afraid. The next week of her life is a test of just how little effort she has to put into her daily routine to maintain her bourgie lifestyle. Annoyed family members, indigenous servants, and professional underlings guide her way as she sleepwalks through her schedule, distracted both by the guilt of possibly having killed a child with her car and by the physiological effects of a head injury. Eventually, she snaps out of it, repairs her car, dyes her hair, and moves on with her life. Nothing happens, and that’s entirely the point.

The Headless Woman is often billed as a psychological thriller, which I suppose is abstractly true. Although there’s not much action or momentum in the fallout of the opening car accident, Onetto’s concussed protagonist is often in danger of hurting more victims because of her temporarily headless state. Whenever she drives a car or shows up to work at her dentistry practice, there’s tension in what damage she might cause while her mind is adrift. Imagine if your next dental surgery was performed by Dougie Jones of Twin Peaks; it’s a nightmare scenario. Ultimately, though, it’s the stasis & rot of her inaction that causes the most damage, as she takes several days to admit to herself that she very probably killed a child. When she manages to voice that confession to loved ones, they immediately shut her down and reassure her that it was likely just a dog, encouraging her to continue to do nothing until the details are muddled and the transgression is forgotten. The constant attention paid to her interactions with the servant class indicate that it would be an entirely different story if she had struck a white child instead of an indigenous one, but that’s a story told through observation, not confrontation. The thrill is in puzzling through the intent behind every image & interaction Martel offers, leaning more psychological than thriller.

I’ve now puzzled my way through three of Martel’s works, and they all are determined to rot in a similar kind of immoral inaction. In her name-maker debut, La Ciénaga, the wealth class of Argentina drink their days away poolside while their estates are gradually reclaimed by nature and their indigenous servants continually refill their cocktails. In her most recent budget-escalator, Zama, an 18th Century Spanish officer is assigned to lord over the indigenous people of Argentina, with no specific orders except to await more specific orders. There’s a gradual madness built by the lack of action or momentum in all three works, and they all point to a cruel, culture-wide pointlessness in the nation’s colonization. Likewise, our figuratively headless protagonist is maddening in her lack of momentum or direction, a psychic wound that does not heal just because she eventually snaps out of it. That immoral stasis & mindless occupation doesn’t make for especially thrilling stories beat to beat, but it leaves a lot of room for the audience to think about the meaning behind each of Martel’s images, which are uncanny in their sinister ordinariness: a room temperature coffee pot, a staticky wedding video, a limp body seen only through the dusty veil of a rearview window.

-Brandon Ledet