The camera acts as accuser and conscience in this intense study of class callousness. Yet no matter how close Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel allows the intrusive lens, dentist María Onetto refuses to let a flicker of concern, let alone remorse, cross her impassive features. Even after confessing to her husband that she ran over a shanty kid, she sleepwalks through her crisis.
With a delusional aunt’s references to ghosts evoking the cheapness of life under the military junta, this is as much a socio-political allegory as a thriller. But it’s also a stringently controlled Antonionian exercise in bourgeois alienation that’s strewn with furtive references to Hitchcock and Buñuel.