‘The Virgin of the Quarry Lake’ is Harrowing [Sundance 2025 Review]

Laura Casabé’s The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, premiering at this 12 months’s Sundance Movie Pageant, is quite a bit like two different pageant favorites morphed into one uncomfortable, horror-adjacent bundle. Quarry Lake has the oppressive and bleak rurality of Carlota Pereda’s 2022 pageant favourite (and eventual Goya Award winner) Piggy alongside the delicate but insidious sexual stress of Molly Manning Walker’s Easy methods to Have Intercourse, which performed on the pageant final 12 months. In different phrases, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is as harrowing as it’s horrifying.

Benjamin Naishtat’s script, tailored from quick tales in Mariana Enríquez’s assortment, The Risks of Smoking in Mattress, prioritizes constancy over low cost style ways. Natalia’s (Dolores Oliverio) summer time is lengthy, hazy, and newly excitedly digital. Within the outskirts of Buenos Aires, simply because the Argentine nice melancholy sputters to an ostensibly not possible finish, Natalia visits cyber-cafes, sits aimlessly in her yard pool, and frequently spends time together with her crush, Diego (Augustin Sosa) and funky new lady, Silvia (Fernanda Echevarría).

The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is Doom and chat rooms, aimless sexual awakening amidst a socioeconomic disaster past a young person’s capacity to grasp, and extra pointedly, not all that in contrast to what they’ve lived by way of earlier than. Natalia’s most troubling disaster is an impromptu quiz from Silvia a couple of band Natalia has lied about liking (to impress a boy), not the frequent journeys to the neighborhood water truck the place her family is allotted two buckets a day.

Natalia’s summer time is wealthy, evocative, and heartbreaking in its stillness, the limitless days and quick-cut nights. Longing melts underneath the summer time warmth, coating Natalia’s pores and skin and coronary heart till the one factor propelling her ahead every day is Diego and the prospect to spend time with him, whether or not chatting on-line or on the titular quarry lake Silvia introduces the buddy group to.

Natalia’s grandmother and neighborhood shepherd for wayward youngsters, Rita (Luisa Merelas), initially indulges Nat’s worst impulses, providing to forged a spell to wedge the connection between Diego and Silvia. Whereas unsuccessful at first, Nat begins to faucet into an vitality inside her, main towards a stunning but liberating conclusion.

A extra grounded, tragic model of The Craft, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is early aughts witchcraft by way of a definite cultural lens. A puddle of blood beneath a gooey, dripping procuring cart simply outdoors Nat’s home expands all through the movie. The digital camera sputters and shakes, at instances signaling temporary but graphic bouts of violence, presumably tethered to otherworldly vitality residing inside Nat’s physique. Akin to her sexuality and want to stay unmoored to expectations, Nat hardly ever understands what it means, whether or not she’s actually accountable or if it’s simply the universe handing her what she innately believes she deserves.

And Dolores Oliverio is a knockout, vicious but sympathetic, a sufferer of a rustic on the brink, endeavoring to carve out her position and sense of company, irrespective of who would possibly stand in her means. Contextually, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is folkloric coming of age rendered terrifying, with pin-point craftsmanship, particularly from the director of images Diego Tenorio Hernández, whose sweeping summer time vistas are directly inviting but tyrannical.

Towards the tip of The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, Nat is informed to embrace her youth. Have enjoyable. Be free. The remainder of her life will probably be depressing, and she or he will likely be, by extension. The limitless freedom of being a young person is incompatible with sulking. It’s sage recommendation, but additionally merciless recommendation. Greater than her friends, Nat is best attuned to the parable of freedom. As classmates rent intercourse staff to lose their virginity, as patrons trash a cyber café when the facility sparkles, as youngsters drown within the mythic quarry lake, Nat is aware of that her life was by no means actually hers to regulate. What’s so fallacious with taking a bit of freedom again for herself?

Tags: Laura Casabé Sundance 2025 The Virgin of the Quarry Lake

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