’90s kids will likely remember teen angst and magic to be a combustible mix in films like The Craft. It’s a simple and effective metaphor for adolescence as hormones rage and the body changes. Laura Casabé‘s The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is a less histrionic take on a supernatural coming of age, where magic dances menacingly around the periphery of quotidian but intense teenage desire, jealousy, and vengeance. It’s more restrained than it sounds, with a streamlined, direct narrative, but is no less startling for it.

In Argentina in 2001, against the backdrop of civil unrest and rioting, three teenage girls fall for the same boy. Natalia (a coiled and eerie performance by excellent newcomer (Dolores Oliverio) is closest to the slightly older Diego (Agustin Sosa) but his head is turned by the older, worldlier Sylvia (Fernanda Echevarría). Natalia turns to her grandmother Rita (Luísa Merelas) for her knowledge of magic to help split them up.

Adapted by filmmaker Benjamín Naishtat (Rojo) from a short story by celebrated writer Mariana Enríquez, Casabé’s vision of adolescence is mercurial, mean-spirited, and occasionally nihilistic. Natalia is not a particularly easy protagonist to warm to, in all the ways that teenagers can be. We know there’s something more going on than simple puberty early one when she squeezes her menstrual blood into Diego’s drink. It’s a bold move to have a main character seemingly formed entirely of sharp edges, but Natalia remains as compelling as a car crash. Think of her as a far less sympathetic Carrie White, and you’ll be in the right area.

Natalia’s rougher edges are a little varnished in relation to the older but not particularly wiser Sylvia, also played for maximum unlikability by Echevarría. She consistently tries to lord it over the younger women, and to seduce Diego, with a constant stream of tall tales and obviously fallacious anecdotes. It takes a little while for the extent of Natalia’s personality to really come to the fore through simple juxtaposition.

Another central aspect to the film is the contextual societal unrest. The setting of 2001 is rich in period detail and the economic situation bubbles with potential violence, making it uneasy viewing from the beginning. The intentions of Naishtat and Casabé will be less obtuse to a Latin American audience, with a deeper level of thematic resonance than we’re likely to glean, but this backdrop seems to be a metaphor for the supressed violence and explosive rage of its protagonist; the body politic as hormonal adolescent. When the inevitable eruption occurs it is sudden, swift, and shocking. The period setting may also be a veiled reference to the frankly chaotic contemporary presidency of Javier Milei.

The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is a simple story with an outcome that’s rarely in doubt, and some of the secondary characters are little more than window dressing, but it unfolds with such insouciant venom and disregard for the niceties of a normal coming of age story – much of that down to that ferocious central performance – that it feels much more singular and exciting than it should. It’s a confident melding of the South American magic realist tradition of Márquez and Allende with more overt elements of horror, and marks Laura Casabé out as a genre director of no little promise.

Screening as part of Sundance Film Festival 2025