Lounging about the murky, brackish swimming pool of her family estate, Verónica (Leonora Balcarce) shares with her siblings and cousins a harrowing tale of a monstrous beast that her cousin Luciano (Sebastián Montagna) calls a rat-dog. The scene begins in medias res, somewhere after the beginning of Verónica’s story, and with a stillness like that of the hot, humid air, she speaks of an African rat that feasts on cats with its several rows of teeth. Her relatives listen without a sound, absorbing her tale with as little resistance as they do the moisture pooling up on their skin.

Important to how Verónica tells this story is her composition within the frame. She props her arms over an inner tube that completely shields her mouth from both the camera and her relatives. Her eyes peek out over it, staring off into dead space as she narrates the story. Because cinematographer Hugo Colace uses a telephoto lens, everything behind Verónica flattens out of focus. This distortion grants the impression that the inner tube bends up toward the back of her head rather than extending out from her body. The result is a bulbous mass that seems to wrap around and smother Verónica like an anaconda. By extension, the background layer of the frame appears much larger and closer than it really is. Not by coincidence, the character filling the background is Verónica’s brother, José (Juan Cruz Bordeu), who appears to be reclining on the back of her inner tube because the lens compresses the space between them. In this moment, director Lucrecia Martel makes palpable the connection between brother and sister that later emerges — a bond filled with hot air, a tension that will either deflate slowly or burst suddenly.

Upon further inspection, the logic of this frame falls apart in the physical space of the scene. Because Verónica sits inside an inner tube and her body below her neckline is hidden from frame, the immediate conclusion would be that she is floating in the swimming pool, her body submerged under water. However, three visible elements of the frame dissuade this conclusion. First, neither the inner tube nor Verónica are wet. Second, if she were in the pool, the inner tube would bob up and down in the water, as happens when inflatable objects rest on a liquid surface. Instead, she remains motionless. And most convincingly, the frame reveals the location of the pool is actually in the background behind José, so Verónica cannot possibly be in it. 

Thus far, the film has established a taboo of entering the pool because of its filth, which is further compounded in the preceding scene when Momi (Sofia Bertolotto) jumps into the water to everyone’s surprise. This scene also shows other characters like Joaquín (Diego Baenas) using their inner tubes as chairs rather than floating devices. Considering these factors, it is safe to conclude that Verónica is on land and not in water, despite the film giving the impression that she is in the pool. Regardless of how the filmmakers achieved this effect — she might be crouching in an inner tube suspended by apple boxes — the importance of this frame is how it evokes the impression that she is some place where she is not. The inclusion of Verónica and José in the same frame is crucial to understanding how the frame creates this impression. The frame grounds José to a recognizable location, the bank of the swimming pool, while displacing Verónica spatially. She appears to exist in the foreground of the frame, floating freely, unattached to anything but her inner tube. Because of this contrast between identifiable and unidentifiable locations, her sense of place is only an effect of the compressed space between her and José.

The feeling of impression is relevant to this scene because the importance is not the image of Verónica telling her story of the rat-dog, but the sound of her voice. The film not only abstracts her body from space but her voice from body. Because her mouth is hidden from the camera, her voice becomes disembodied, transmogrified into an unworldly presence separate from her body; the slight tease of an omnipresent, omniscient voiceover narrator. Like the cicadas in the distant rainforest, the articulation of her voice is due to its sound and not the movement of her mouth. 

Verónica’s abstracted voice, then, serves to impress the story of the rat-dog into the memory of her audience. When young Luciano listens to Verónica’s narration, the lasting impression is not of the hot, summer day, the inner tubes, or of her. Instead, he remembers the tale of the rat-dog. Because he is young and easily impressionable, the innocent story transforms into fears and irrationalities that haunt him day and night. His impression of the story eventually results in his demise when in search of the rat-dog, he topples from a ladder. The viewer can conclude that without Verónica’s story, Luciano would have never wanted to climb the ladder to catch a glimpse of the mysterious dog in his neighbor’s yard. What takes root as a small, unimportant idea manifests into an overbearing nightmare. 

Explicitly, the film reminds us of how Luciano’s obsession with the rat-dog began as an innocent story told in passing on a hot, summer day. Immediately following a shot of Luciano’s crumpled body lying in his family’s courtyard, the film cuts to a shot of Verónica on the telephone. Because her silhouette fills the edge of the frame, backlit so that her body is in shadow, the image feels unevenly weighted. The right side of the frame feels heavier, producing an uneasiness that signifies Verónica’s distraught anxiousness. By cutting directly from Luciano’s body to Verónica, the film reminds us of the connection between them, the story of the rat-dog.

But beneath it all, Luciano’s death is not entirely about the impression that Verónica makes on him. Subtly and very implicitly, Martel uses the story of the rat-dog and demise of an innocent character like Luciano to draw conclusions about Verónica’s impression of her brother, José. The shot of Verónica at the telephone ambiguously hides who she is calling and why she is upset. The audience cannot discern if she is distraught over Luciano, José, or something else entirely. The film then cuts to a scene with José, yet this editing choice does not explain if he is the one she is upset with. This sequence of three shots bridges a correlation between Luciano, Verónica, and José. 

The relationship among the three characters is one in which the carelessness of one person leaves a lasting, damaging impression on another. If a rat-dog story could have such powerful effects on Luciano, the film evokes an imagination of what effects José makes on Verónica. Just as Verónica leaves an impression on Luciano that results in his curious search for the rat-dog, José’s impression on Verónica might manifest into obsession. As she reaches puberty and tries to rationalize newfound feelings and emotions, Verónica might question her physical relationship with her brother and his intentions to wrestle with her and invade her shower. She is likely to have questions about this childhood summer for the rest of her life. 

During these moments of physical intimacy, the cinematography tends to include frenetic, close-up handheld shots. Elbows, shoulders, grins, and legs fill the frame, jostling about frantically as cinematographer Hugo Colace tracks their movement. Telephoto lenses flatten the distance between characters and emphasize compression of space. A key example of this cinematic style is when José and Verónica dance with their family and friends in Mecha (Graciela Borges)’s bedroom. Only parts of bodies appear in frame because the lens is not wide enough to capture such frantic movement. Hence why some frames consist of only necklines and torsos as dance partners move about the space. This dancing scene demonstrates how telephoto lenses insist upon a level of intimacy between characters, pressing layers of bodies on top of each other to accentuate relational bonds.

However, Martel also uses telephoto lenses, their flattening effects, and compression of layers to provoke anxiety. Shortening the distance between characters accentuates the violence they act upon each other. For instance, when José gets into a fistfight at a carnival, his violent punches appear to travel a greater distance than they actually do. This effect is due to the relationship between the frame, the dimensions of which do not change, and the perceived distance within the frame, which appears smaller than it really is. So the frame provokes anxiety because José appears to move through depth and impart violence at enhanced rates. Similarly, telephoto shots in the fishing scene where the children use knives to impale fish feel anxious because the distance between knife and body flattens out and compresses. Anxiety over injury is due to the impression that the children swing knives mere inches apart from each other, when in actuality, they might be several yards apart. 

While La Ciénega establishes patterns where telephoto shots spatialize associations of either intimacy or anxiety, the film also constructs scenarios in which the border between the two becomes ambiguous. As the film progresses, it begins to question its own filmic language, and intimacy and anxiety merge into one. Telephoto shots suddenly read as intimate displays of platonic affection, but the association of the flattening of space simultaneously instills a level of anxiety. These shots feel unsettling and disturbing because the boundary between intimacy and violence loses its identity. This uncanny effect appears most pronounced in the latter scenes with José and Verónica. The duel framing of intimacy and anxiety between siblings constructs a notion that their relationship is somewhat incestuous. In close-up shots where they wrestle, tend to the other’s wounds, or lie next to each other, the line between platonic familial relationship blurs and José, because of the impression that his body moves through depth at an enhanced rate, appears to impart violence on Verónica. Here, the telephoto lens presses them upon each other by shortening the distance between them.

A prime example of this effect is the shower scene. The lens flattens the image enough so that José and Verónica feel pressed against each other, despite being separated from the shower curtain. José and Verónica appear as close to each other as Verónica is to the camera (read: the audience). It feels as if the viewer is physically present in the space, watching action unfold. 

If the telephoto lense gives the impression that the scope between viewer and objects appears closer together, wide angle lenses grant the feeling that the distance between viewer and object is stretched. While Martel uses telephoto lenses to instill a claustrophobic spatiality between brother and sister, she uses wider lenses to alienate her subjects and give the impression they are under surveillance. They become objects of the viewer’s gaze.

In the scene where Verónica crawls into bed with José, the frame induces anxiety and insists upon a notion of incest because the wide-angle camera positioning exposes their bare bodies for the viewer to see in their entirety. Unlike telephoto shots where the distance between camera and body compresses, this frame offsets the bodies in bed, transforming them into objects out of reach to the viewer. This shot gives the impression that the camera looks at them, rather than with them, as occurs in the shower scene. The viewer becomes voyeur to the stillness of the room and the lack of movement between characters. The dwarfing of their bodies and expansion of distance between objects accentuates this stillness, further alienating José and Verónica as objects of someone’s gaze.

There is one wrestling scene between José and Verónica where stillness and frantic movement work together to put the characters under surveillance. Through the rear-window of a car door, children in the foreground watch the two siblings quarrel out-of-focus in the background. The wide angle lens increases the distance between the voyeurs, the children, and the objects of their gaze, José and Verónica. While the siblings cross the screen as they wrestle, flailing their bodies and making large movements, the frame appears motionless because the foreground elements are still. The relationship between foreground and background further emphasizes stillness because of the interface in place, the rear-window. The overexposed background, which appears on the other side of the window, manifests itself as a frame-within-a-frame. It almost appears that the children in the car watch not through a window, but a projection on a screen. As such, the film brings to the light the audience’s spectatorship, commenting on how the viewer sees the exchanges between José and Verónica as unsettling and inaccessible. This frame calls attention to its lack of intimacy, shot not from the perspective of José and Verónica, but someone looking-in.

The construction of José and Verónica’s relationship acts as a case study of what incest looks like on-screen. Telephoto lenses construct incest as perceived by José and Verónica. To them, their relationship appears intimate because of the closeness they share with each other. However, this closeness manifests itself with notions of anxiety because their bodies appear to move across space at a faster and larger rate. Because of depth compression, character action feels combustible and volatile. Wide angle lenses suggest a different apprehension, in which stillness accentuates the uneasiness of their closeness. In these shots, wide lenses construct notions of what incest looks like to outsiders. By combining both types of shots across scenes, La Ciénega guarantees to induce anxiety anytime José and Verónica interact with each other in the same frame, regardless of lens choice.