The Headless Woman (2009)

The Headless Woman (dir. Lucretia Martel) may not be a traditional horror movie - there are very few horror movie tricks here - but this film scared the shit out of me. The normal horror movie might make you jump at a sudden gruesome face or startle you with some gory situation; The Headless Woman had another type of effect. It worms into my mind, and stays there, impinging its sense of dread on my consciousness for days on end. What is more, even though the movie conjures up a vivid feeling of horror, it is a horror that stems from guilt, conscience. I don't know if I have ever seen such a quietly scary portrait of guilt before: I mean guilt here in the sense of it changing one's entire world, the way one perceives, the way things announce themselves.

Some movies tries to take you "inside the head" of some of its characters. Few succeed. The Headless Woman does, and the result is quite stunning (in this film, it seems, a "subjective" approach is all-important; without it, not much of what makes it special would be left.) The story starts and ends with Veronica and what happens to her one day when she is driving home from a family re-union. She hits something with her car, we see her head hit the wheel and we see her gaze at something. Afterwards, the camera follows her almost sleep-walking through life, reacting, holding back her reactions, trying to act normal. This sounds like it could been a Hallmark production about a car accident. Martel structures the movie like an existential mystery, or a nightmare (where one thing suddenly turns into another) but she leaves it at the most ordinary level; and maybe that's the reason why the film crept under my skin.

The Headless Woman shows many sides of guilt and conscience. It shows it as haunting, as a person being placed besides herself, alienated from herself, split from herself, but it also shows the reaction of denial: the hope that somebody else will fix things, or that it will fix itself, that guilt can be dissolved by convincing oneself that "it was nothing". But this is far from a detached philosophical account of a perspective. Martel lets the images present us with a very tactile, embodied state; concussion, trauma, lack of response, numbness, disorientation. Very few bodies are as corporeal as this one, and corporeality here means everything from what it means to act in a body, to how one's perception and attention is guided by and interacts with a specific surrounding. Martel often works with skewed impressions, looking at something one does not quite see, or perceiving something as something. She works in a similar way with sound and voices - how a voice appear as if from nowhere, but still somehow close.

There is something else going all as well which I haven't mentioned. Veronica lives in a wealthy family. Early on, we get the feeling that appearances are to be kept up, no matter what. Everything that rings a bit odd, or appears a bit outside the "normal" is brushed off as tiredness, as something that will go away if one just rests a bit and takes it easy. The ghosts and myriads of secrets and strange relations evoked in the movie tells another story: and here Veronica's numb and disoriented state is situated in a much bigger pattern of family relations and the way one learns to keep quiet, to etch a polite smile on one's face and say the things one is expected to say. (If you start to think about Antonioni at this point, you're on the right track.)

BIG RECOMMENDATION FOR THIS MOVIE!!