Laura Casabé’s second feature is a worthy engagement with the social-sexual horror fiction of celebrated Argentine author Mariana Enriquez, whose 2016 Things We Lost in the Fire brought her her first acclaim among English-speaking readers. The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is a mashup of two of Enriquez’s fictions, “The Cart” and “Our Lady of the Quarry” from her 2006 collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Benjamin Naishtat’s screenplay extrapolates a boldly specific world around the latter story’s nominal protagonist Natalia, Nati, played by Dolores Olivero, who does smoldering rage and heartbreak with great nuance in her first film role.
Set mostly in a suburb of Buenos Aires, the film tracks the unraveling relationship between a group of young women and Diego, the one guy they all want to take their virginity, during a blistering summer at the turn of this century, when Argentina tipped into a major economic crisis. The film opens with a brutal encounter between one of Nati’s neighbors and a homeless man, whose lingering presence, in the form of a grocery cart left behind in the street, filled with unknown, probably unspeakable items, sets the film’s tone of imminent chaos, violence, and collapse. Power and water outages are rampant, money is tight, crime is pervasive, and the threat of losing everything puts immense pressure on social bonds, disrupting the everyday generosities one might otherwise extend to a neighbor or family member in need.
That’s the broader social scene. Nati’s focus is much narrower, captured visually in the film’s frequent, claustrophobic use of tight framing and shallow depth of field. Nati and her two closest girlfriends have a high school history with Diego, a history of as yet unfulfilled desire that, as one girl says, makes him “someone that’s always been ours,” someone they’re loathe to surrender to an older woman he’s met online, Silvia, Sil, who has her own apartment in the city and knows more than any of them about everything: bands, clubs, travel. If Diego is drawn to Silvia’s seemingly cosmopolitan exoticism, Nati and her uncanny, witchy squad are in no mood to surrender their crush or to offer the outsider any morsel of generosity. And yet they can’t just conjure Diego’s desire, so what power do they have to stop what seems like an inevitable hookup with Sil, a prospect that’s framed as an existential cliff? “You’re throwing your whole life away on that,” one of the other girls cautions Nati. But, in some sense, Argentina’s, and particularly Nati’s generation’s future feels at stake.
This is to say that, as in much of Enriquez’s fiction, the society crumbling around Nati is not just a backdrop but a deep well of horror and dark power. Nati’s frustrations maybe her own, but the force of her vengeance is fed and even embodied by the rage all around her. The remote, abandoned quarry that gives the film its title and where the gang goes to swim in what Sil guarantees is cleaner water than that at the public pool is one more example of rampant economic failure, haunted, allegedly, by its own specters of greed, exclusion, and cruelty. These might emerge at any time, Sil says. But who are those demons really after and who controls them?
The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is a powerful tale of rivalry and despair that toys at times, almost amusingly, at the edges of excess. Its mystery is, overall, nicely played…until the end, which, sorry to say, takes on a graphic, visual literality that I found disappointing and unnecessary when suggestion and ambiguity had otherwise been so effective. Nevertheless, it’s a pleasure to see Enriquez’s work translated to the screen this way and fans of her writing, as well as fans of psychological horror, should definitely give this one a look.
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