260 min | NR | April 21, 2023 | The Cinema Guild
A woman vanishes from a small town on the Argentine pampas, and the man who loves her starts retracing her movements. What he finds is a chain of mysteries hidden inside a botanist’s pressed flowers, a stranger’s love letters, and a thing in a lake. The deeper he digs, the more she dissolves.
Laura is a botanist who comes to the town of Trenque Lauquen to catalog plant species and then disappears. Two men go looking for her. Rafael is her partner. Ezequiel is the local radio host who helped her chase a secret buried in the margins of old library books. The film follows their search and then abandons it, because the real subject is not where Laura went. It is why a person would build an entire interior life that nobody around her can see. Laura Citarella structures the whole thing as a set of nested mysteries, each one opening into another, until the search for a missing woman becomes a study of how women go missing in plain sight.
Laura Paredes plays Laura as a woman who listens more than she speaks. She co-wrote the role, and she gives Laura a watchfulness that makes every gap in the story feel deliberate. Rafael Spregelburd plays Rafael with the wounded patience of a man who assumed he knew his partner and now learns he did not. Ezequiel Pierri plays Ezequiel as the willing accomplice who falls in love with the investigation itself. Elisa Carricajo and Verónica Llinás anchor the strangest stretch of the film, two women guarding a secret in a lakeside house. The performances stay quiet and exact even as the narrative keeps reinventing what kind of movie this is.
Citarella co-writes the screenplay with Paredes, and the two build the film in distinct movements that each carry their own texture. The cinematography treats the flat pampas landscape as something vast and unreadable. Roads run to the horizon and dissolve the human figures into the grass and sky. The editing withholds and delays, cutting away from resolution at the exact moment a lesser film would deliver it. Sound does the heavy lifting in the lake sequences, where what stays offscreen carries more dread than any image could.
This is a film that rewards patience and punishes anyone who needs answers handed to them. Citarella treats the mystery genre as a delivery system for something stranger. Every clue leads to another woman who chose to disappear into a story of her own making. The film never explains Laura because explaining her would betray the point. It builds four hours around the conviction that a person can stay unknowable, and it has the nerve to leave her that way.