The Holy Girl2005
The Holy Girl (2005)
TOMATOMETER
AUDIENCE SCORE
Critic Consensus: This provocative, lyrical drama mixes themes of forbidden sexuality and redemptive faith with a touch of humanism in a memorable, if disorienting, visual style.
The Holy Girl Photos
Movie Info
Cast
as Inés
as Dr. Cuesta
as Amalia
as Freddy
as Madre de Josefina
as Helena
as Dr. Jano
as Dr. Vesalio
as Josefina
as Mirta
Critic Reviews for The Holy Girl
All Critics (61) | Top Critics (25) | Fresh (47) | Rotten (14) | DVD (5)
Director Lucrecia Martel's storytelling is spare to the point of being stingy.
Martel's style is tentative, elusive, so much so that even the most conventional episodes benefit from her fresh perspective.
A very intelligent movie marked by candor and compassion.
Ultimately turns out to be something of a bore, a film that, like one of its main characters, wanders around touching on subjects and then fleeing before connecting fully.
A uniquely intriguing motion picture.
A low-key tone poem about the passions of sex and religion
Audience Reviews for The Holy Girl
Whereas in La Ciénaga Martel was always able to maintain a tight structure and focus even with a huge gallery of characters, in this case her notably flawed narrative - despite her usual social commentary and a promising premise - lacks cohesion and seems to go nowhere.
Super Reviewer
"The Holy Girl" is one of the most boring films I've ever seen. Set in a hotel during a doctors' conference, it chronicles myriad banalities such as people having lunch together silently. Then we watch maids doing laundry. Then the children of hotel employees take religion classes together. Then teenage girls wash their hair, etc. One banal sequence after another. One girl who lives at the hotel starts to have feelings of longing for one of the doctors at the conference after he touches her in a provocative way one day. She starts following him around the hotel, and he tries to avoid her. The girl's mother also develops a mild crush on this doctor, which is hard to understand because he barely ever speaks or does anything interesting. Almost no one says anything interesting. There is practically no script at all. I cannot understand what writer/director Lucrecia Martel thought was so interesting about all these banalities. Her most recent film, "The Headless Woman," was vastly more interesting. By contrast, "The Holy Girl" has almost no content whatsoever. This is a must-avoid.
Super Reviewer
Martel defies the canonized "Catholic" topics by alienating the values of love,detest and sickness.Inner sickness,vacant passion and finally,that tempest called teenage years.The languid pace of the film doesn't repulse the viewer,on the contrary...I felt more repulsed by the holiness of certain characters,thus giving me a reason to disrespect their religiousness.
Super Reviewer
The Holy Girl Quotes
There are no approved quotes yet for this movie.