Starring Mercedes Moríƒ ¡n, Maríƒ ­a Alche, and Carlos Belloso. Rating unavailable.

The opaque qualities of The Holy Girl are certain to baffle some moviegoers. But those willing to go with the dark flow of Lucrecia Martel's undulating vision are rewarded with insights into the troubled aspects of adolescence and everyday life.

Okay, now that I've scared away the fence sitters, I can let the rest of you in on the action. The story mirrors that of Lolita, being told from the point of view of a mostly guileless 15-year-old. It takes place at a rundown hotel in the Salta region of Argentina, a sweltering counterpart to the gothic South, if we can judge by this and director Lucrecia Martel's previous feature, La Ciénaga, in which two sweaty, middle-class families slowly choke on booze and overgrown vines.

A group of doctors have gathered for their annual retreat, an event that some, like aging lothario Dr. Vesalio (Arturo Goetz), take as a chance to chase the opposite sex. Hey, those lab girls do seem pretty frisky. But the mild-mannered Dr. Jano (Carlos Belloso, a Latino Kelsey Grammer type) isn't that sort, exactly. He's more likely to rub up against a teenage girl in a crowd gathered to watch a street musician. The married doctor isn't aware, of course, that the object of his anonymous affection, Amalia (Maríƒ ­a Alche), is the teenage daughter of the hotel manager, Helena (Mercedes Moríƒ ¡n, who also anchored La Ciénaga), an attractive former diver to whom he is also drawn. In an almost sublimely perverse case of not being careful for what you wish, both females respond to his very different advances, leaving him in a quandary as to-well, you do the math.

The director, who is not yet 40, is startlingly talented. Her work recalls the sure, stylized touch of 1960s directors like Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini. But Martel's camera (actually that of veteran Félix Monti) feels anything but bored or formalistic. It restlessly probes the hidden recesses of the characters, cutting off limbs and foreheads so that we are forced to focus on soft mouths or, especially, ears cocked for messages from private sanctuaries of spirit or flesh.

Here, the murmurs come in the form of hissing bug spray, drips from the hotel pool (where negotiations of a Romanesque nature take place, if only unconsciously), and repeated incantations of religious intensity. Sometimes these are specifically Catholic, as in Amalia's catechism class, led by a testy beauty (Míƒ ­a Maestro, last seen in The Motorcycle Diaries) whom the girls mock because they've seen her French-kissing her boyfriend. But the voices heard most loudly-along with the otherworldly theramin that keeps insinuating itself into the story-have a hormonal ring to them, and the love of Jesus is inextricably tied in with, shall we say, more devilish impulses.

Overriding these concerns, ultimately, is Amalia's relationship with her best friend, Josefina (Julieta Zylberberg), a connection fraught with enough tenderness, betrayal, and unspoken carnality to last a lifetime, mothers and doctors be damned.