Laura Casabé's latest film "The Virgin of the Quarry Lake" was one of the feature films competing for the first place at this year's Final Girls Berlin Film Festival, and was among my absolute favorites. Thus, I wanted to unpack this work and see how it was stitched together from two short stories by grand-master of horror Mariana Enriquez, Our Lady of the Quarry and The Cart both from her 2009 collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Let's first take a look at the short stories, and then the film. There are possible spoilers, so maybe read the stories, watch the film, as usual.
The short story is told in the voice of a Greek chorus, enhancing the mob mentality of an unidentified number of girls of the age of sixteen, who are jealous of Silvia, their one friend who is older than them and has her life sorted out. She has a job, she has her own flat, she has traveled a lot and has good taste in music. She also has Diego - the object of desire of them girls.
Especially Natalia has set her eyes on him - despite her being younger, despite her being hotter, despite her being prettier, and despite her casting a spell on him, Diego ends up falling in love with Silvia.
The humiliation of a final trick that Diego and Silvia play on them to spend some time alone is too much, and the results are, with a little help from our Lady of the Quarry, lethal.
A short, but striking piece of writing about jealousy, hostility and competition between women, intensified when the girls realize that the titular statue of the Lady of the Quarry isn't Virgin Mary at all - the quarry is a dirty, dangerous and godless place that answers their unholy prayers. Best to steer clear of these girls.
The Cart (El Carrito)
Something contagious it had brought from the slum.
The other short story is the third story in the collection, The Cart, in which the inhabitants of a street have been cursed by an old, homeless, drunken man. The "villero", a slum-dweller, enters the street with his shopping cart that carries his belongings, and takes his pants down and takes a shit in the middle of the street. Consequently he is beaten and roughed up by some inhabitants of the neighborhood, but the narrator's mother, who is working in the medical field and is thus a respected person, can prevent an escalation and stops them from killing him. While the homeless man is forced to leave without his cart, he utters words in unintelligible tongues. It turns out they have been cursed and everyone except the family of the narrator experiences ruinous things in the weeks to come - loss of money, loss of job, theft, bankruptcy, deadly accidents, and the following poverty, no electricity, no internet, no water, no phone, no food, no money, and the following misery, fights over supplies, eating their pets and animals, suicides. Only the narrator's family is spared but they act as if they are poor too. They need to find a way to protect themselves because sooner or later their cover will be blown.
This is one of the shorter short stories of Enriquez which have the tendency to just touch upon a situation, an excerpt, sort of, and even though we have a situation evolving, beginning and development, there is no end here. No end for the narrator's family nor for the inhabitants of the street. We only know that their poverty that transformed into misery has now reached the stage of brutality.
The Virgin of Lake Quarry (2025)
Let us now take a look at what director Laura Casabé and screenplay writer Benjamín Naishtat did with this source material.
The story of Nati (Dolores Oliverio) who lives with her aunt is set against the backdrop of the economic crisis which took place in the end of 90s, beginning of 00s in Argentina. Nati has exactly two best friends, Mariela and Josefina (I think they are twins but I'm not very sure with my poor face recognition skills), and each one of them wants to sleep with their friend Diego. It so happens that Diego falls for the older and more experienced Silvia, and Nati asks her aunt, who is versed in curses and black magic, to cast a spell in order to curse Silvia. At the same time the incident with the homeless man happens in their street, after which a veritable evil breaks out, not only in their neighborhood, but in the whole of Argentina.
During a very vulnerable but also exciting time of their lives, the friends spend their days in pools or lake shores, kind of wasting their lives in a country that feels destitute.
There is so much in this movie that resonated with me... Growing up with the feeling of being in a place that's set aside, a place where regular power outages are normal and we needed to fill our bathtubs with water because we didn't always have running water, a place where women feel poor and powerless and hold on to the few sources of power that's left - their beauty, religion, or black magic. These took me back to my summers in Izmir.
The element of the curse builds a bridge between the two source stories and helps dovetailing the deeply intimate and personal with the national turmoils going on.
As the ability of Nati and her aunt of putting maledictions on people is left ambiguous and questionable, there seems to be at least some kind of supernatural happening of a bigger scale going on, namely the curse of the man from the slums - thefts, riots, power outages, all these elements which are indeed very real, very palpable social dysfunctions prepare a certain setting, an uncanny atmosphere of uncertainty, unpredictability.
In such turbulent times, Nati's body and psyche are equally unpredictable - her awakening womanhood is highlighted in several scenes of masturbation and this awakening goes hand in hand with a seemingly (highly doubtful) feminine intuition through which she claims to be able to recognize bad people. And although in a couple of incidences she's right, sometimes she also may be wrong. As in the case of Silvia.
This awakening female power is, though not at all present in the written work, reinforced in the movie in several scenes. For instance all women characters in this story have plenty of agency - from the aunt who owns her house and has a sort of financial superiority to her lover; to Nati trying to seduce Diego having full confidence in her youth and beauty; to Silvia who traveled around the world, went to concerts, loves music and loves life in contrast to Diego who is truly objectified, he's merely someone used for sex, as is the conventional role given to pretty actresses in films. There is this reversal of conventional film structures that enforces the power play displayed. Nati and Josefina going to a sex worker in order to lose their virginity strikes us as funny, even though it is how many boys experience their first sex, but when girls do it, it edges on unbelievable. All these and finally Nati brutally attacking the boys who catcall her are peak scenes for this augmenting tension that leads to the catastrophic incidents at Lake Quarry.
As a person who does not speak fluent Spanish and isn't familiar at all with nuances of the language, I was bummed to find out there were details I missed while watching Our Lady of the Quarry because of this. I was talking to Coral Fustero who did the collage workshop at the past Final Girls Berlin who is a native Spanish speaker, albeit from Spain, and we were discussing this movie. I have to add that I watched this film twice, once the screener for my jury duty which was just me at home, and the second time during the Festival in an auditorium which was sold out (this happens rarely!) and it was full with the Argentine community. I also, for the first time, saw how Argentine people react to the name Mariana Enriquez and I'm convinced she's something like a superstar over there. Anyway, having had the chance to watch the movie with a native audience was eye-opening because they were reacting in ways I personally would have never guessed, mainly laughing a lot and reacting genuinely distressed to the curse scenes. But after the screening I asked Coral why people were laughing so much, and she said that the actresses were acting quite seriously, like almost cold, emotionless, but the lines they said were incredibly passionate and emotional, creating a contrast that rings funny to the Argentine ears. Details like this are so neat.
Verdict - So, both Enriquez short stories are great. But the film doesn't only take two separate writings and seamlessly combines them, it also enriches the overall work with added elements. And although I loved reading the stories, the movie was a completely separate joy for me, due to which I am letting the movie win. The Virgin of Lake Quarry by Laura Casabé wins this round of Based on Books!
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