The Holy Girl

Successfully capturing the sultry, confined feel of a small, family-run hotel, where a medical conference sets the stage for a casual but potentially devastating encounter between a religion-obsessed adolescent girl (Maria Alche) and a visiting doctor (Carlos Belloso) with self-destructive urges, writer-director Lucrecia Martel's characters in The Holy Girl are filmed close-up in cramped rooms and narrow hallways, creating a mood of vague disquiet. But the narrative itself is so fragmentary and allusive that trying to make much sense of it is like grasping at smoke. The apparent theme of the film revolves around touching and not touching--the ability to make human contact without causing damage--but even that's never made explicit, and just as The Holy Girl seems to be heading for a climax that might piece everything together, it opts for ambiguity instead. An optional purchase. [Note: DVD extras include a 23-minute “making-of” featurette, and trailers. Bottom line: a small extras package for a disappointing film.] (F. Swietek)