In one of her last summers before real life and responsibilities take over, Natalia (Dolores Oliverio) agonizes when her crush falls for someone else—a teenage rite of passage that takes on a more sinister cast in Sundance selection The Virgin of the Quarry Lake.
Based on a pair of short stories by Mariana Enriquez, Laura Casabé’s film draws on the unease of its setting—it takes place in Argentina circa 2001, a time of political and economic upheaval—as well as the real-world dangers sparked by Nati’s churning emotions. It yields a provocative yet nuanced portrait of a young woman who learns to embrace her primal, powerful anger, for better and worse.
With no family other than her sharp-tongued grandmother (Luisa Merelas), Nati spends the hazy summer days with her best friends, sisters Josefina (Isabel Bracamonte) and Mariela (Candela Flores); when she’s not with them, she’s chatting with them online from the local internet cafe—an early indicator that The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is set nearly 25 years ago. Other signs include Nati’s fashions (her plastic “tattoo” choker necklace is retro perfection, as are her low-rise jeans) and the increasing sense of chaos infiltrating the world around her. We overhear snatches of bad-news reports from background TVs and worried neighbors, then we see the urgent fallout, including a water shortage and frequent power cuts.
More symbolically, at the start of the movie an unhoused, inebriated man pushes his shopping cart into the middle of Nati’s street, then stumbles away after being badly beaten by an offended passer-by—but not before making uncomfortably prolonged eye contact with her. Even before another character says it aloud, there’s a sense of a curse being placed on the block, as the cart, which is filled with oozing bags of something and other ominous objects, lingers unclaimed for weeks.
Another mystical element enters the narrative early when Nati grumbles to Rita about the annoying existence of Silvia (Fernanda Echevarría), who’s about 10 years older than Nati and her friends, and whose worldly cool has caught the attention of the friend group’s sole male member, Diego (Agustín Sosa). Rita’s solution is to write Silvia’s name on a piece of paper and place it into a jar, casting what’s presumably a bad-luck spell. We don’t immediately see any effects from this, but Nati’s fury grows more intense as Diego begins blowing her off to spend time with Silvia. Rarely has a jealous glare across a strobe-lit dance floor felt more malevolently potent than the one we see here.
While the audience never gets a sense of what makes Diego so great—we learn almost nothing about him, and his main appeal seems to be “he’s around”—that’s possibly the point, as The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is more interested in exploring the tangled-up inner lives of teenage girls. Oliverio’s naturalistic performance conveys a character who pinballs between puffed-up confidence and extremely low self-esteem, and who must navigate growing up in an unstable environment where men (and some women, too) are not to be trusted. It’s a life where change nearly always brings with it some form of heartbreak.
To dig too deeply into what makes The Virgin of the Quarry Lake—so named for the isolated swimming hole the friends visit through the summer—a genre movie would be to spoil its shockingly surreal intrusions. But horrors, both all too real and fantastical, are what help Nati find her way to catharsis.
The Virgin of the Quarry Lake played at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It does not yet have a release date.
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