Lucrecia Martel is best known outside Argentina for The Holy Girl, an atmospheric film about a teenage girl who becomes obsessed with a stranger after a chance encounter on the street. Unsettling and disorientating, it marked Martel as a director to watch. Using the same kind of enigmatic style, her third film, The Headless Woman, takes Martel’s cinematic vision and challenging narrative to another level – her story of class division is told almost silently, making lead actress María Onetto’s remarkable performance, hardly speaking for much of the film.

Onetto plays Verónica, a rich, white, professional woman living in a rural Argentine town. When Verónica has a mysterious accident on a dusty rural road, she seems to suffer a mini-breakdown, a kind of rupture with reality. Drifting through town, detached and bewildered, she seems unable to recognise people she's known all her life. Maybe she killed a dog on the road, but maybe something much worse happened.

Unwilling to tell stories in a traditional way, Martel uses the narrative simply as a vessel to explore larger ideas. In subtly detailing how Verónica, her husband, and the rest of the town confront guilt, grief and uncertainty, Martel constructs a complex and devastating parable about social class in contemporary Argentina.

★★★★★ "Disturbing and deeply mysterious, this tale of ghosts and guilt is nothing short of a masterpiece" The Guardian

★★★★★ "A work of frenzied genius" Time Out

★★★★★ "Mysterious, absorbing and utterly singular drama" Daily Telegraph

★★★★★ " Fascinating" Sunday Times Playlist