REVIEWED - THE HOLY GIRL/LA NINA SANTACo-produced by Pedro and Augustin Almodóvar's El Deseo company, La Nina Santa, the second feature from Argentinian writer-director Lucrecia Martel, is set during the winter in the town of La Cienaga, when the Hotel Termas is taken over for a medical conference attended by eye, ear and throat specialists, who, incidentally, mostly seem to be chain-smokers.

A recently-divorced woman, Helena (Mercedes Moran), the hotel owner, enjoys the attention showered on her by Dr Jano (Carlos Belloso), a friend from her teenage years, but she is aware that he is married with children and that his wife and family are due to join him at the hotel. However, Helena is unaware that the doctor has suggestively rubbed his lower body against the back of her daughter, Amalia (Maria Alche) when she is among a street crowd watching a theremin player. Amalia, who is 16 and curious about sex, sets out on a self-imposed mission to save this man from sin.

Martel brings an assured visual style to this narrative set-up and its consequences, and adeptly captures an eerie atmosphere in which the rundown state of this once-grand hotel is a metaphor for all the moral decay that is revealed. And Alche is notably expressive as the precocious Amalia, whose coming-of-age is charted with some imagination and insight.

It is all the more disappointing, then, that Martel goes on to take a non-judgmental view of her protagonists, and self-indulgently interrupts the narrative progress with intrusive non sequiturs. Her protracted film turns frustratingly oblique just when it appears to be achieving the dramatic catharsis it demands.