a film by Lucrecia Martel
A woman is driving on the highway. She becomes distracted and runs over something. On the days following this incident, she fails to recognise the feelings that bond her to things and people. She just lets herself be taken by the events of her social life. One night she tells her husband that she killed someone on the highway. They go back to the road only to find a dead dog. Friends close to the police confirm that there were no accident reports. Everything returns to normal and the bad moment seems to be over until the news of a gruesome discovery again worries everyone.
The film opens on a rural highway in north-west Argentina. A group of young boys with a dog are playing on the road and in the dry canal which runs alongside. Meanwhile, not far away, a group of friends, parents and children, prepare to leave a gathering. One middle-aged woman, Verónica, who runs a dental clinic with her brother, gets in her car and drives away by herself. On the road she is momentarily distracted when her cellphone rings and whilst reaching across for her handbag, she hears a loud thud from under the car. The impact throws her head back and then forward, hitting the dashboard. She stops the car, but disturbed and in shock, is unwilling to get out to investigate. Instead she drives off, and glancing in her rear view mirror, glimpses what appears to be the body of a dog on the road behind. Farther down the road she stops the car and gets out to walk around while the first drops of rain of an approaching storm begin to spatter the windscreen.
At the local hospital where Veró is x-rayed she appears confused and disorientated. She becomes disconnected from her daily life, barely registering what people are saying and what is happening around her. She is also unable to explain with any clarity anything about the accident but eventually tells her husband, Marcos, that she killed someone. That night he drives her back to the spot where it happened but they find only the body of the dog. Juan Manuel, her husband's cousin and her occasional lover, contacts a friend in the police who confirms that there were no reports of an accident that day. But one week later a missing boy's body is retrieved from the canal, washed down after the heavy rains and blocking the flow of the water. Veró's family and friends then join together to erase all traces of the accident ever having occurred.
Verónica's privileged life, her unwillingness to take responsibility for her actions, her feelings of guilt and remoteness from reality, all serve as a metaphor for the attitude of the bourgeois middle classes towards the suffering that surrounds them but which they refuse to acknowledge. The film, in linking the 1970s period of Argentina's dictatorship with the current time, calls attention to the fact that the blindness of the past continues to the present day in the growing disparity between rich and poor.