Olivia: Mysterious debut about a missing butcher presents a bold new voice in Argentinian cinema

The opening shot of water on fire gives clear insight into the keen interest in elements – with elementality, really – that establishes Sofía Petersen’s authorial voice in Olivia, her debut feature. In a triangular house isolated in a stark Patagonian landscape, the titular character, played with a feral intensity by Tina Sconochini, lives alongside her father (Dario del Carmen Haro Santana), who works by day as a butcher in a slaughterhouse. Theirs is a simple, impoverished existence, not unlike that of a very similar cinematic pairing, in Bela Tarr’s final feature The Turin Horse (2011), which Petersen pays direct homage to in a re-creation of that film’s famed potato-eating scene. One day, her father suddenly and inexplicably disappears. Her searching for him forms the core of the narrative.  

Olivia is not really tied down to narrative, however; Petersen’s approach is tethered to the visual and the affective in equal measure. Shot predominately at night, Olivia’s wanderings unfold with a horror movie-like creepiness that emerges as the film’s most compelling driver, in lieu of a strongly defined emotional arc. The colour correcting overdrive applied in post – the night sky is purple rather than blue, the yellows are acrid – illustrate the mania of Olivia’s inner world, though without much of a script, it is difficult to parse the origins of her malaise. 

Other than an avid interest in insects and her acute panic at the disappearance of her father, we are allowed very little insight into who Olivia is, why she is the way she is. Hints at a back story are never properly explored, leaving us hovering before the mystery. Finally, there are some first-time filmmaker problems here, such as an over-reliance on the score of Indian composer Utsav Lal; one cannot help but imagine how mysterious and affective certain scenes would have been if played out in silence. If anything, it would have made the film a tad less romantic, a bit more stark and clinical; indeed, it is a finer balance between the two that I found myself craving.  

Still, the promise of Petersen’s vision resides in her fierce, defiant introspection: a quality that is notoriously difficult to evoke in the cinematic medium. Olivia’s lonely quest reaches a sort of apotheosis towards the end, when she encounters a fellow scavenger on a shore searching for his absent wife’s wedding ring. “Time erodes,” he says, “making everything look the same.” But Olivia doesn’t really look like anything else on the cinematic landscape, implying that the New Argentine Cinema might have found its latest descendant in Sofía Petersen.  

► Olivia is in UK cinemas now.