La virgen de la tosquera is a film that oozes heat, uncertainty, and tension. In it, the Argentine summer of 2001 isn’t just a backdrop but a thick atmosphere that seems to soak into every gesture, every glance, every silence. What begins as a seemingly simple story about a teenage girl obsessed with a boy soon becomes tangled in a web of symbols, discomforts, and dark impulses that overflow any clear genre label.
What’s most unsettling isn’t the supernatural element or the moments of sudden violence, but the way youthful desire and frustration are metabolized into increasingly disturbing forms. The protagonist, Natalia, is not an innocent victim. She is desiring, determined, at times manipulative. But she is also wounded, abandoned, and confused. It’s in that ambiguity that the film finds its real edge.
The narrative twists slowly. What seemed like a summer love story gets contaminated by the presence of the inexplicable, the sinister—a kind of unease that can’t be fully named. At times, the film seems to suggest that what’s happening has magical or esoteric causes. But it never fully commits to that idea. That indecision is one of its greatest virtues—but also one of its traps. At moments, it feels like the film doesn’t quite know which rules it’s playing by. Narrative choices shift its internal logic, and that lack of cohesion isn’t always justified within its own framework. What’s presented as a film permeated by adolescent confusion, not-knowing, and chaos, sometimes turns into pure contradiction, as if the elements were reorganized according to the needs of the moment rather than of the whole.
Even so, there’s a real force in how La virgen de la tosquera captures a time and a sensibility. The country is on the verge of collapse, and that social breakdown seeps into small domestic gestures, personal relationships, the empty or agitated streets. That sense of things on the brink—of nothing working, of latent violence awaiting its moment—turns the film into an emotional mirror of a generation marked by abandonment.
The fantastic appears intermittently, almost as a symptom rather than a cause. There’s something in the way rituals, curses, and the forbidden are hinted at that recalls the best works of magical realism—but here it’s tinged with a much more tangible anguish. The strange doesn’t come to save; it comes to deepen the wound. The film also manages to transmit a sticky sensation—of crushing heat, of suspended time. La virgen de la tosquera is set in a summer where night barely seems to exist, where desire becomes punishment, and tenderness is in short supply. That feeling is what lingers, even when the plot seems to lose its way. The scenes between Natalia and her grandmother carry a special strength, as if the film breathes there. Likewise, the moments with Kechu—a child who bursts into the house like a figure disrupting routines—provide brief emotional oases in a story dominated by tension. However, it’s in the confrontations between Natalia and Silvia that the film’s true duel unfolds: two forms of power, two kinds of desire, two ways of inhabiting femininity. La virgen de la tosquera is an imperfect but fascinating film. Its strength doesn’t lie in wrapping its story up with coherence, but in leaving wounds, questions, and possibilities open. Like those summers one never fully forgets, because something dark—though we might not know exactly what—was awakened there forever.
