This is one of the most original films I've seen in years. This director has a truly unique sensibility. I took off one point only because maybe the film is, for want of a better term, gratuitously obscure. But still--Lucrecia Martel is obviously very gifted and someone to watch for and the acting is uniformly excellent. It's also very funny in a very deadpan style.

As the opening scene informs us, it's a film about religious education, either misperceived by the adolescent girls or perceived all too well. Director Martell is on the side of the latter, though she doesn't mind a lot of ambiguity. Humid sexuality, violation, transient living, moral upheaval: that, it seems is the nature of the holy and why not?

A film as mysterious as life itself - and sometimes as vague and disjointed. Whatever its lacks as skillful film and smoothly told story, The Holy Girl more than makes up for in stunning images of female sexuality coming into consciousness. The male characters are such tepid and pathetic little housecats one's fear them (in the face of these lionesses!) almost overcomes the disgust or exasperation they continually inspire. The older female characters - the mother, the grandmother, the religion teach - are by turns confused, cynical, despairing or leading a double life in this stultifying, decadent, yet male-dominated world, which is as corrupt and seedy as the old hotel. The Holy Girl is not a sexy film, since there is no male sexual energy to speak of in it, rather is is directly about sexual power of the female kind. its terrible birth and destructive energy when there is nothing to oppose or balance it.… Expand

I saw the film twice. Itt reminds me of the best of Eric Rohmer films, but the female characters are better drawn in this film.