In her mesmerizing follow-up to La Ciénaga, Martel offers an alternately dark and playful allegory about religion, desire and familial guilt focused on two mischievous girls unable to distinguish between their spiritual and sexual yearnings. Martel’s meticulous attention to sound is elevated to a major theme of La niña santa, which uses its extraordinarily subtle soundtrack to explore the ineffable, musical texture of voice and the fallibility of language. Set largely within a hotel, where a group of ear, nose and throat doctors have gathered for their annual conference, La niña santa transforms the accidental triangle that emerges between a girl, a promiscuous doctor and her mother into a fascinating prism of refracted, contradictory desire.