A young woman named Lourdes is consumed. By whom or what? Society, poverty, illness, her love for her son, her son’s death, and even herself. A Spanish woman who moved to America for work, she labored in a small restaurant, saving every penny for her son’s surgery—only for him to die before the operation could take place. From that moment, her psyche fractures into multiple parts. A thin layer of consciousness remains, but it’s too fragile to keep Lourdes afloat. She suffers from hallucinations but doggedly continues to save money, despite the absurdity of the situation—her son is already gone.
The central figure of her fear is the ghost of a man with an otherworldly face. He appears here and there, catching her attention, and, surprisingly, is even captured on surveillance cameras. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that the man is a projection of the heroine’s own soul—most likely her Animus. It’s evident that her psyche is organized around the Shadow, while her Ego temporarily becomes its shadowy aspect. This unconscious part, now freed, allows her to do what she would never consciously dare—she kills, steals, and remembers nothing of these acts. Finally, pursued by one of her own unconscious soul aspects, she loses her footing and falls down a flight of stairs. In the morning, police confirm her death.
So, what can the viewer take away from this film? It serves as an illustration of how a person driven by hyper-motivation (what we call a shift from motive to goal) loses sensitivity to what’s happening around them and, as a result, becomes ill. Due to this built-in "super-driver," the heroine stops feeling fatigue, guilt, fear, sorrow, or anger, allowing events and people to consume her. Moreover, she’s in a culturally hostile environment with no close friends, family, or even acquaintances nearby. Trapped in a state of both internal and external resource deficit, her psyche finds no better solution than to split into multiple parts. It seems there are four such parts, appearing in this order. First, the male ghost figure—a Trickster. He’s cold-blooded, cruel, and physically overwhelming. The heroine sees him for the first time. Next appears a dark-skinned woman who behaves like a best friend to Lourdes. She’s gentle, kind, and supportive, serving as a resource for the heroine’s maternal identity. Almost before the bloody climax at the end of the film, Lourdes encounters her own double in a restaurant basement, but this doppelgänger always turns away, avoids contact, and terrifies her with dark whites of her eyes. And the fourth part of the heroine’s psyche is her own identity, which shrinks more and more over time. If you pay close attention, the beginning of her psyche’s collapse is marked by states of what Ogden and Meltzer call "non-experience" (absence), or Grotstein’s "psychotic non-being." Ogden views this state as a high-level defense mechanism resorted to when all other coping strategies fail. Lourdes repeatedly adjusts a fork on the table, finding it in the wrong position each time, unable to realize she herself placed it there. This was the first warning sign, a signal of danger indicating that her personality was beginning to crumble. Ignoring these signals, against the backdrop of the trauma of loss she couldn’t process or integrate, led to the tragic outcome.
