About halfway through The Headless Woman, the spellbinding third film by Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, a young woman attempts to seduce her mother's friend Veronica (Maria Onetta in a hypnotic performance). Like Veronica, who has spent much of the film in a daze of amnesia following a car accident, the audience doesn't understand why the young woman is doing this. It's sudden and unexpected and is cast off with a simple tsk-tsk. Moments later, the young woman says that love letters are to be responded to or returned, and we are treated to a brief scent of who Veronica once was.

This sense of unknowing is a seductive constant in Martel's film and it invites the viewer to both relate to Veronica and question everything that happens to her. For every subtle revelation, we are inspired to mull over past behavior and innuendo for evidence but, thanks in part to the film's inspired editing scheme, Veronica remains a mystery that her creator refuses to solve. I have seen the film three times now and each time I find myself concentrating more closely on Veronica's most seemingly minor actions and the off-center yet pointed placement of Martel's camera.

When Veronica initially appears, she is corralling children in and out of cars as her friends make plans and trade beauty tips. One mother, Josefina (Claudia Cantero), learns how to make her eyelashes look just right in the reflection of a car window as her son paces inside the car like a zoo animal. They all begin the trek home but Veronica's trip makes an abrupt stop when, while reaching for her blaring cell phone, she hits something. The accident leaves her with a deep case of amnesia which she never reveals to any of her friends or family as she attempts to wedge herself back into her daily routine.

The Headless Woman unravels as a purposefully discombobulating dark comedy, teeming with class critique and social intrigue but unassuming and artful in its delivery. Filled with behavioral humor, the film's biggest gag is that no one seems to notice any change in Veronica's behavior. Wandering into a hotel, Veronica is met by a man who knows her and he takes her up to her room. She kisses him and they make love and, a few scenes later, we realize the man isn't her husband but rather Josefina's husband. Like the situation, the film's tone strikes a haunting pitch between bewilderment and humor.

Now 43, Martel has two previous films -- 2001's La Cienaga and 2004's The Holy Girl -- and like her latest, their views of the Argentinean bourgeois border on Buñuelian levels of scathing absurdity minus the surrealism. In Girl, the correlation between class and a paradoxical obsession with sex and religion were given a thorough workout, but a more menacing undercurrent lies beneath Woman. A child's death and a grieving family are trifles to Veronica's flock. The victim of the accident remains ambiguous for much of the film, but the amnesia becomes less about her inability to remember herself and more about her unfamiliarity with feeling or relation to any class below her. Like her first two films, The Headless Woman is set in the director's hometown of Salta, but under Martel's exacting headtrip formalism, it really becomes a state of mind.

Aka La mujer sin cabeza.