Director – Xavi Sala – 2025 – Mexico – 127m
*****
A legal secretary frustrated in her job embarks on a relationship with another woman, but her possessive mother does not approve – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
This certainly knows how to grab your attention at the start. An icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) hangs on the wall. On the bed, a grown woman pleasures herself until… The earth moves! Everything is shaking, and she quickly recovers her composure as her middle-aged mother runs in to get her out of the house as the earthquake alarm goes off.
After, they eat at the meal table, and her mother (Mercedes Hernández from New Order, Michel Franco, 2020) asks Vale (“Va-lay”; Zamira Franco also from New Order), who she’ll later address as Valeria, to pick up prescriptions while she’s out and makes sure she doesn’t forget her packed lunch. Then it’s train, bus and the walk past colourful stalls to work. Vale’s office with about half a dozen or so people seems to be piled high with paperwork. They are dealing with the cases of people being arrested. One man being interviewed claims that one of them is lying. Vale is working on a computer, the stenographer taking down everything accurately.
At home, her mother works at making clothes: she has a huge backlog and a heavy delivery deadline. They enjoy a TV dinner. Vale gives her mum’s feet a massage. Tomorrow, it’s the trial about the kid whose fingers got crushed. She tells her mum not to meddle in her affairs. Later, Vale tells her to get out of the bathroom when mother interrupts her getting out of the shower.
And, in a nutshell, that’s what this is about: mother and daughter relationships – specifically, an overbearing mother. Outside the home, Vale experiences freedom. Work is frustrating; she is essentially a trained lawyer working as a secretary, but she can sort that out in due course. She initiates a relationship with fellow Tinder user Tania (Ruth Ramos) who works advising journalists in conflict zones but doesn’t like to talk about work on her dates. They meet for coffee and stay late at the restaurant, sharing a big pitcher of what appears to be beer. She comes through the door quietly at home, although the latch is clunky, only to be confronted by her glaring mother who wants to know where she’s been, and with whom.
As her relationship with Tania develops into full-blown bedroom activity, Vale’s family situation worsens. Her mum harasses her by phoning her at work and, when Vale doesn’t come home as usual (because she and Tania are in a nightclub) hits the bottle. Later, Vale and Tania hit a rocky patch as the darker-skinned Vale accuses the lighter-skinned Tania of racism.
After fitting a padlock on her bedroom door, Vale brings Tania home to her now lockable room and plays loud music to mask the sound of the couple’s physical goings on. Her mother tries to work against the noise, but can’t. She is distraught about the whole thing.
Tania splits up with Vale, but then has second thoughts and tries to reconcile. They spend the night together at Vale’s, and in the morning, after Vale has left for work, her mother makes Tania breakfast. But then, Tania stops returning Vale’s messages, and Tania’s boss tells her that Tania had received death threats, which might explain her disappearance.
Now the daughter settles back into her former routine with her mother, who seems relieved. However, all is not as it seems and there are dark secrets lurking within the family home…
You’d be forgiven for imagining, given its frustrated lawyer protagonist and her war correspondent advisor love interest, that this lesbian romance was a political thriller, but such material is merely the backdrop to the main mother and daughter show. And the title might lead you to imagine the main character to be sexually inexperienced, but this doesn’t seem to be the case either.
The eponymous virgin refers rather to the Virgin Mary of Catholic faith, who as a framed icon, a vagina-like shape around her person (recalling the opening of Little Trouble Girls, Urška Djukićon, 2025), hanging on Vale’s bedroom wall, and who Vale later imagines, in another lone masturbation session, in her own semi-naked image. When the couple hit the nightclub, it is full of figurative Catholic imagery: life-sized statues of Jesus at the sides at a higher level than the dancers, along with statues of nuns clad in habits.
If the overall focus is on Vale’s sexual identity rather than her Catholicism, towards the end, mother and daughter can be seen attending a Catholic church ostensibly to pray for the disappeared Tania. At this point, the mother confesses that she has done something terrible, although she fails to clarify exactly what that might be.
The use of sound is exemplary in creating atmosphere – be it the sound of a train journey, the background city sounds when eating at a food bar or the mother’s sewing machine treadle. A thunderstorm outside the building really sounds like a thunderstorm! The loud, pulsating music in both the nightclub and Vale’s padlocked room convey the frenzy and passion of the beat, while, in complete contrast, numerous scenes feature unobtrusive birdsong in the background.
The final half hour is very different from what has gone before, developing the character of the overbearing mother in a way that would have made Hitchcock proud, something this writer for one could not have seen coming. That is not to say this is anything like a Hitchcock film – it really isn’t, and doesn’t possess either any obvious Hitchcockian stylistic tricks in the way that, for instance, Brian De Palma’s Hitchcockian thrillers do, or themes as last year’s Critics’ Picks entry I, the Song (Dechen Roder, 2024) did. The psychopathology of the mother, though, is as unsettling as any of Hitch’s matriarchal figures. Both the romantic relationship and the mother and daughter one are deftly handled by the three main players, and director Sala holds the whole thing together with considerable skill.
The Silent Virgin premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival which runs in cinemas from Friday, November 7th to Sunday, November 23rd 2024.
Trailer:
Critics’ Picks mashup trailer:
Festival teaser trailer: