This film was released 19th February 2010, and is no longer screening.

Argentine writer-director Lucrecia Martel, long-regarded among the most promising new voices in world cinema, takes a significant step forward with this exquisitely rendered cinematic puzzle. Produced by Pedro Almodovar, it’s the mesmerising portrait of a bottle-blonde woman of a certain age who can’t quite put herself back together again after she runs over something – maybe someone? – on the drive home. She’s not exactly clear on who or what she hit, yet ever since the incident she can’t really be sure of anything; suddenly it’s as if her life is not really hers to live.?? Martel trusts the audience to pay attention to the telling micro-details painstakingly revealed in the course of events, but she rewards us with a brilliantly unsettling vision of disconnected lives in a country where class divisions and a dark political history lurk just behind the everyday. Justified comparisons with Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Antonioni’s L’avventura give some idea of her accomplishment. Notes by Trevor Johnston