‘The Virgin of the Quarry Lake’ Review: A Spooky Tale of Teenage Angst

The deep style roots of Laura Casabé’s The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, tailored by Benjamin Naishtat from a collection of horror tales by acclaimed Argentinian author Mariana Enríquez, won’t be instantly obvious. However properly earlier than Casabé delivers on the promise teased by some ominous mystical tropes, the story already feels extra fraught and scary than your typical coming-of-age drama. The best way the movie sees it, there’s no terror fairly like a teenage lady with no outlet for her feelings.

The 12 months is 2001, which doesn’t take lengthy to discern given the sight of choker necklaces, AIM chats, and a giant poster of Leonardo DiCaprio in The Seaside plastered on a bed room wall. However the actual indicators of the time that seep into the soul of 19-year-old Natalia (Dolores Oliviero) are extra localized. As Argentina slumps right into a devastating financial disaster, the manifestations of destitution and deprivation are not possible to disregard throughout her.

The movie opens with these macro-level market forces turning into unavoidable, with a beggar arriving on the scene with a procuring cart full of his belongings on the avenue the place Natalia lives together with her grandparents (Luisa Merelas and Dady Brieva). The vagrant leaves after a neighbor beats him up, however the cart, improbably, stays put for the movie’s length. Be it an issue of authorities resourcing, a failure of collective motion, or a haphazardly positioned hex by its unique proprietor, the smelly eyesore festers like an open wound that nobody has a will or solution to deal with.

No quantity of socioeconomic instability, although, is sufficient to deter the self-interested Natalia’s quest to lose her virginity, ideally with the barely older Diego (Agustín Sosa). Whereas she thinks she maintains an edge in wooing him over the different two ladies in her clique, Josefina (Isabel Bracamonte) and Mariela (Candela Flores), she fails to anticipate the rivalry that emerges from an outdoor power in the older and extra skilled Silvia (Fernanda Echeverría).

Your common coming-of-age movie tends to dramatize the maturation into society at massive by means of the miniaturized battle of assimilation into teams. The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, nonetheless, finds its narrative propulsion by dissolving a social unit already in place at the begin of the movie. Isolation and alienation come to outline the closing 12 months of Natalia’s teenagers as the protracted battle for male consideration drives a wedge in her friendships with Josefina and Mariela.

Not since newcomer Katie Jarvis burned up the display in Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank has a performer rendered teen angst with the rawness and resonance of Oliviero. Her portrayal of Natalia resolutely avoids the apparent traps of enjoying an immature character as careening from one risky state to a different. As The Virgin of the Quarry Lake shifts tonal and style registers, Oliviero stays the movie’s one fixed by means of line. Throughout the efficiency, the actress methodically tracks how Natalia’s envy curdles into self-loathing.

Casabé abstracts these typical feelings of tortured teenagers, solely to then amplify them, a reminder of how outsized these sensations appeared to us once we skilled them throughout the weak age of adolescence. The routine deployment of subjective sound design in The Virgin of the Quarry Lake plunges the viewer straight into Natalia’s turbulent headspace as she hits acquainted however no much less irritating milestones of distress inside her numerous relationships.

This growing convergence of the mundane and the magical permits Casabé to stay the touchdown on the movie’s tougher pivot to horror as Natalia’s anxieties attain a breaking level. Visible motifs of blood or the specter of an alleged curse by the homeless man who left the cart are however faint specters of the supernatural early in The Virgin of the Quarry Lake. For some time, these components really feel like they could quantity to nothing greater than false begins or, worse, purple herrings that artificially inflate the narrative stakes by hinting at larger forces that can by no means rear their head.

Casabé, although, brings every thing to a head in a finale that sees an explosion of Natalia’s pent-up anguish sublimate into overt anger. It’s right here the place she tonally reconciles the warring components raised by Naishtat’s script: the society-wide turmoil and the individualized torment, to not point out the extraordinary energy of teenage rage as embodied by an in any other case atypical lady. Casabé’s objective for making The Virgin of the Quarry Lake crystallizes in its gory, gratifying conclusion: to indicate the pains of rising up and guarantee they’re felt on a visceral degree.