Before writing about The Headless Woman, I did what I always do before articulating my position: I read other criticisms about the film in question. The first of the six reviews I read—a review by a critic I usually do not like, Stephen Holden—turned out to be the best one. In the very first paragraph, it said exactly what I wanted to say about The Headless Woman: "A full appreciation of Lucrecia Martel's elegant, rain-soaked film, The Headless Woman, requires the concentration and eye for detail of a forensic detective. Every frame of this brilliant, maddeningly enigmatic puzzle of a movie contains crucial information, much of it glimpsed on the periphery and sometimes passing so quickly you barely have time to blink." This is precisely the greatness of this film. It is about watching films. Many years ago, Elvis Costello sang about "watching the detectives." The Headless Woman is about watching a movie as if you were the detective.

The standard arrangement for a crime film has been this: The viewer watches the detective watching, focusing on the world he is in. With The Headless Woman, we have a new arrangement: The viewer watches the film from the position and with the same intensity of a detective. Set in modern Argentina and centered on a middle-class, middle-aged woman with blond hair, the movie begins almost immediately with a crime—a crime, however, that is as much in the head as it is in the world. The Headless Woman is not about trying to catch the criminal, the blond woman, but trying to understand the nature of her crime. What made it possible? Why her and not someone else? The clues are in the intimate spaces that she daily enters and exits. The Headless Woman is a treat for those who, like a detective, can focus on the details of life. Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Wed 7, 9 pm.