Laura Casabé’s The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, premiering in the World Cinema Dramatic category at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, fuses gothic horror with the suffocating weight of adolescence, set against the backdrop of Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis. It’s a coming of age tale as harrowing as it is horrifying, where the supernatural and the social are inextricably linked, each feeding off the other.
Based on two stories from Mariana Enríquez’s The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Benjamin Naishtat’s script prioritizes psychological depth over conventional genre thrills. Natalia (Dolores Oliverio, in a stunning debut), along with her best friends Mariela and Josefina, navigates the restless purgatory of post-high school life, where uncertainty looms as large as their adolescent fixations. Chief among them is Diego (Agustín Sosa), an older boy whose sudden interest in the enigmatic Silvia (Fernanda Echeverría) threatens the trio’s fragile equilibrium. When desperation drives Natalia to seek supernatural intervention, her attempts to reclaim control spiral into something far darker than she anticipated.
Casabé’s direction is masterfully restrained, allowing tension to simmer beneath the surface before erupting in bursts of violence, eroticism, and the uncanny. The film’s horror isn’t just supernatural; it’s embedded in the instability of a generation raised amidst blackouts, looting, and systemic collapse. Casabé doesn’t just evoke this setting, she weaponizes it, using Diego Tenorio Hernández’s cinematography to craft an atmosphere both languid and claustrophobic. The quarry lake itself is a site of transformation, an eerie, mythic expanse that represents desire, danger, and possibly something even more terrifying.
With shades of witchy classics like Carrie and The Craft, Casabé’s latest arrives as a chilling, visually striking meditation on power, jealousy, and the lengths one will go to for control. Natalia’s journey is not one of self-discovery so much as self-possession, a refusal to accept that her life is not hers to shape. If the world won’t give her freedom, she’ll take it — no matter the cost. Bleak, mesmerizing, and deeply unsettling, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is a stellar offering that will hopefully be accessible to genre fans in the near future.
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