'The Virgin of the Quarry Lake' is Harrowing [Sundance 2025 Review]

Laura Casabé’s The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is a lot like two other festival favorites morphed into one uncomfortable, horror-adjacent package. Quarry Lake has the oppressive and bleak rurality of Carlota Pereda’s 2022 festival favorite (and eventual Goya Award winner) Piggy alongside the subtle yet insidious sexual pressure of Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex, which played at the festival last year. In other words, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is as harrowing as it is horrifying.

Benjamin Naishtat’s script, adapted from short stories in Mariana Enríquez’s collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, prioritizes fidelity over cheap genre tactics. Natalia’s (Dolores Oliverio) summer is long, hazy, and newly excitedly digital. In the outskirts of Buenos Aires, just as the Argentine great depression sputters to an ostensibly impossible end, Natalia visits cyber-cafes, sits aimlessly in her backyard pool, and regularly spends time with her crush, Diego (Augustin Sosa) and cool new girl, Silvia (Fernanda Echevarría).

The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is Doom and chat rooms, aimless sexual awakening amidst a socioeconomic crisis beyond a teenager’s ability to comprehend, and more pointedly, not all that unlike what they’ve lived through before. Natalia’s most troubling crisis is an impromptu quiz from Silvia about a band Natalia has lied about liking (to impress a boy), not the frequent trips to the neighborhood water truck where her household is allotted two buckets a day.

Natalia’s summer is rich, evocative, and heartbreaking in its stillness, the endless days and quick-cut nights. Longing melts under the summer heat, coating Natalia’s skin and heart until the only thing propelling her forward daily is Diego and the chance to spend time with him, whether chatting online or at the titular quarry lake Silvia introduces the friend group to.

Natalia’s grandmother and neighborhood shepherd for wayward kids, Rita (Luisa Merelas), initially indulges Nat’s worst impulses, offering to cast a spell to wedge the relationship between Diego and Silvia. While unsuccessful at first, Nat begins to tap into an energy within her, leading toward a shocking yet liberating conclusion.

A more grounded, tragic version of The Craft, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is early aughts witchcraft through a distinct cultural lens. A puddle of blood beneath a gooey, dripping shopping cart just outside Nat’s house expands throughout the film. The camera sputters and shakes, at times signaling brief yet graphic bouts of violence, possibly tethered to otherworldly energy residing within Nat’s body. Akin to her sexuality and desire to remain unmoored to expectations, Nat rarely understands what it means, whether she’s really responsible or if it’s just the universe handing her what she innately believes she deserves.

And Dolores Oliverio is a knockout, vicious yet sympathetic, a victim of a country on the brink, endeavoring to carve out her role and sense of agency, no matter who might stand in her way. Contextually, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is folkloric coming of age rendered terrifying, with pin-point craftsmanship, especially from the director of photography Diego Tenorio Hernández, whose sweeping summer vistas are at once inviting yet tyrannical.

Toward the end of The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, Nat is told to embrace her youth. Have fun. Be free. The rest of her life will likely be miserable, and she will be, by extension. The limitless freedom of being a teenager is incompatible with sulking. It’s sage advice, yet also cruel advice. More than her peers, Nat is better attuned to the myth of freedom. As classmates hire sex workers to lose their virginity, as patrons trash a cyber café when the power flickers, as kids drown in the mythic quarry lake, Nat knows that her life was never really hers to control. What’s so wrong with taking a little freedom back for herself?