La Virgen de la Tosquera (2025) a.k.a. our national Carrie. Some thoughts on the film.

(Written last April)  That 's how we ended up calling, in internet discussions, the 2025 Argentinian film La Virgen de la Tosquera by Laura Casabé. I was very hyped to see it after tons of posts praising it and even campaigns to make more cinemas screen the film, since at the beginning it had a very quiet and limited release. Campaigns were a success, the film got screened more days and on more cinemas and finally it landed in my city’s theater. And there I went, after all, how could I miss a horror movie made in our country, directed by a woman and based on short stories by a female writer, Mariana Enríquez?

It didn’t disappoint. I left the cinema more convinced of the talent that our nation bears. The film does an excellent job telling us a coming of age story with a social crisis background and wrapping all with horror. A horror that sometimes felt Lynchian, that in other times was the natural outcome of the female experience or the natural outcome of living in 2001 Argentina. The first kind of horror, the Lynchian, was strong in scenes where a situation or object of everyday life in the Conurbano Bonaerense, gives place to surreal and nightmarish scenes. The camera closes in, the colours change in favour of a coldish and somber palette, mundane background sound gives place to a constant buzzing noise with dissonant chords played on a synth: our subject now embraces it full strangeness and we feel the uneasiness that Natalia, the 19 years old protagonist, feels. In one particular scene, Natalia comes from the bathroom to the living room of her house, to see an unknown kid sitting in almost darkness watching TV. Mind you that in said scene, supposedly it is sunny outside, but the house has this gloomy illumination that strips us of the unconscious safety of daytime. She chases the unknown child though the house, and then, she stops at the door. Now the darkness is gone, for she is in the backyard and with the sun the strangeness of the kid is partly deconstructed: Natalia’s grandma explains to her that this child is the son of a neighbour who is hospitalized and he doesn’t have other relatives to take care of him. He is still a stranger forced into Natalia’s life by forces beyond her grip (in this case, the socioeconomic context). This scene exemplifies the director’s ability to use, in a way that resembles David Lynch's, all the technical means to convey the symbiosis between the growing horror inside Natalia’s head and the horror of the hostile social context where she lives; her fear becomes ours.

In our triad of horrors, the one that made the film gain the nickname “Our national Carrie”, is the one that borns from the female experience. We follow the struggle of Natalia in a world where all seems beyond her control, even her own head. It all begins with again, a stranger, interrupting into her life. This stranger is another woman, one more experienced, more free, who becomes the object of Natalia’s jealousy and envy, an obstacle between her and her crush. Natalia is not alone, she has two friends who navigate with her the same insecurities, the same unfulfilled lust for life, and the same search for freedom. But Natalia feels alone, and the camera lets us know so by closing into her, and we see in the eyes and facial expression how painful are the thoughts that haunt her mind. The supernatural breaks free from subtlety the moment Natalia surrenders to her darkest feelings and, after being called crazy by her grandma’s boyfriend (another stranger forced into Natalia’s life), she manifests psychic powers akin to the film “Carrie”. Paradoxically, this surrender grants her the control she sought, and takes us spectators to the final scene where there’s no boundary left between the realism of the characters and context, and the supernatural elements this time represented in the alchemy between the reborn Natalia and the myth of La Virgen de la Tosquera. 

To finish this entry, I have to admit that it was difficult to choose between to write about the technical aspects or the more symbolic and story telling aspects, and as a result the review written above is kinda clumsy. Nonetheless, the film is excellent and it succeeds in not leaving you indifferent.