Films that try to convey a state of disorientation live and die by their central metaphors, and the one that lends Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman its title is certifiably lame. After hitting a young boy—or was it a dog?—with her car while reaching for a cell phone, our middle-aged bourgeois dentist Veronica (Maria Onetto) pauses, drives on, and presumably loses her mental bearings. I say presumably because we don't know anything about Veronica prior to this scene, so her reintroduction to her husband, her lover, and her office mirror our own state of unknowing. In other words, when her husband drags an animal carcass into the kitchen to carve up tonight's dinner, both the viewer and the protagonist are pretty seriously weirded out. It's an audacious beginning to an unconventional narrative, but unfortunately Headless Woman does little more than chart Veronica's slow and steady disengagement from adult life, and then her unconvincing reentry.  Akiva Gottlieb