‘La Ciénaga’ at 25: A Landmark That Keeps Growing

La Ciénaga is populated by wounded people. There is Mecha, who sliced her chest open after drunkenly deciding to walk around carrying glass tumblers; her son Joaquín, who nearly lost an eye in an accident; her daughter Verónica, marked by a scar on her chin; and José, the eldest, bleeding after being beaten up. Mecha’s husband Gregorio has begun to develop strange blotches on his skin, and Luciano—Tali’s son—has constant nosebleeds.

In La Ciénaga, nature itself feels violent. The heat presses in on every pore and the dust is overwhelming: it sticks to windows, seeps into clothes, gets breathed in with every step. The swimming pool is filthy, and when Verónica tells the story of the gigantic African rat, it suddenly doesn’t sound all that absurd.

Mecha (Graciela Borges) lies sprawled out, much like her own mother once did, after spending years confined to bed by depression. Her son José arrives from Buenos Aires to see what happened with the glass incident and does little more than shower and stare out the window. Gregorio, as ineffectual as ever, wavers between dyeing his hair and pouring himself another glass of red wine that looks uncomfortably like blood.

Tali (Mercedes Morán) is Mecha’s cousin and closest friend. She lives in the town of La Ciénaga itself, a place where boys throw water balloons at girls and apparitions of the Virgin Mary appear behind, beneath, or beside a water tank.

Tali also has a partner and several children who, when they’re not singing with their voices chopped up by the hum of a fan, like to hold their breath just to see what happens. She drives out to Mecha’s estate to check on her, sits down to drink mate, and talks about another friend—the one who lives in Buenos Aires and “never sleeps alone.” Mecha feels sorry for Tali, with that husband of hers and the dangers of the flooded scrubland, but Mecha has a swimming pool, so Tali loads the kids into an old car and heads over anyway.

All of this happens in La Ciénaga. It is a lot, and it is nothing. And yet much more happens. Momi—another of Mecha’s daughters—is in love with Isabel, the Indigenous maid. Mecha wants to fire her “because the Indian girl steals towels and sheets.” The children handle guns. A cow slowly sinks into a real, literal swamp. No one is having sex, but everyone is sniffing around it.

La Ciénaga is a universe of small things, a kind of compilation of provincial life’s B-sides: people who talk more than necessary without saying anything, and others who say nothing yet suggest almost everything. It is full of truths precisely because it imposes none—except for sketching a certain middle-class decay. With the generous commitment of a remarkable ensemble cast, never striking a false note, Lucrecia Martel constructs in her first feature a kind of chorus of fears and desires that offers no respite.

Beneath the false appearance of circular time and sluggish stagnation, what settles in—without ever fully exploding—is a constant tension: familial, sexual, social, generational, racial. It weighs heavily. La Ciénaga hurts; it is felt in the body. It unsettles and fascinates at once, the way many great films do. And it achieves this through fully realized cinematic means: a gaze that is neither condescending nor accusatory, a light that does not beautify but communicates, and a narrative shaped by the characters’ inner rhythms.

One could say that La Ciénaga is a delicate film. It is a precious object within Argentine cinema, a fragile piece that deserves to be handled with care. That delicacy and fragility come from its unusual and daring decision to bypass conventional plot mechanics and push beyond them, toward some remote place that—despite being inhabited by African rats, mysterious Virgins, and deep swamps—feels unmistakably familiar, close, and personal.

Martel’s debut would, over time, become the key film in the renewal of Argentine cinema and a touchstone no local filmmaker can ignore. Possessing a singular style, detached from any fashionable aesthetic trend, the Salta-born director emerged—after a handful of shorts, most notably Rey Muerto—with a fully formed voice and a clearly defined sensibility.

Recognition came quickly. The film won the Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, and her next two features (The Holy Girl and The Headless Woman) competed at Cannes. Her return in 2017 with Zama was celebrated as the comeback of a hero. In the nine years between her last two films, her figure became almost mythical for both local and international cinephilia.

In some ways, La Ciénaga is her most conventional film—always by the standards of her own body of work, which grew increasingly risky and personal over time. It is also the most imitated. And yet the Martel phenomenon resists classification: her style is too singular, too outside the norm, to allow for clear genealogies.

Even so, Martel and La Ciénaga have become the filmmaker and the film most representative not only of Argentina but of twenty-first-century Latin American cinema as a whole. And as the years pass, their stature only continues to grow. It is no longer just a film or a reference point, but a goal, a challenge, a legend—like the ones Verónica tells from the middle of that filthy swimming pool.