Directed by Lucrecia Martel. Starring Marí­a Onetto and César Bordón. In Spanish with English subtitles. Unrated. Plays Friday and Saturday, December 18 and 19, and Monday, December 21, at the Pacific Cinémathí¨que

Writer-director Lucrecia Martel’s dank, disturbingly oblique third feature paints a portrait of class privilege just as the rot is setting in. The Swamp and The Holy Girl alluded to peculiarities in the Argentine character as depicted in a cinematic language too idiosyncratic to allow easy pigeonholing. With The Headless Woman, Martel tackles more universal material; the inner meanings, though, are more specific than ever.

Things are set in motion—or fixed in stone, seen another way—when middle-class Verónica (Marí­a Onetto) finds her day off interrupted by a seemingly minor mishap. After driving past a gaggle of peasant kids and an old dog on a dusty country road, she feels an odd thump and hits her head. She doesn’t see much in the rear-view mirror. On returning to the city, Verónica gets an X-ray and then checks into a cozy hotel and goes to sleep, promptly forgetting who she is.

It eventually emerges that she’s a dentist married to a quietly controlling fellow (César Bordón), although he is certainly not the man (Daniel Genoud) with whom she has furtive sex at the hotel. Her amnesia lifting, she frets that more than a dog might have been harmed, and both men use their connections to squash any attempt—including her own—to investigate further.

The thriller aspect is too cryptic to arouse much CSI–type interest, and it’s hard to fathom some of the family relationships. But if you know anything about Argentina’s painfully cruel history—about the self-inflicted Dirty War of the 1970s or the ongoing obliteration of the darker, smaller indigenous people seen scurrying around the troubled Caucasians here—you’ll realize that Verónica has an awful lot to forget.