By B. Ruby Rich

IN LUCRECIA MARTEL'S stunning new film, The Holy Girl, an adolescent girl dives into a swimming pool. The male members of a visiting conference of ear, nose, and throat doctors circle the perimeter, eyeing the girls, flirting with their mothers, one-upping each other. The provincial hotel surroundings are ripe for drama, and we think we know what kind. After all, this setup is European cinema's stock in trade, from A Day in the Country to Celebration. Sometimes it ends in farce, sometimes in tragedy. But no: though Martel spent a few months in Paris on a Cannes Cine-Foundation grant, she's got an entirely different story in mind, and her own way of telling it.

Anyone lucky enough to see Martel's first feature, La Cienega, knows the Argentine wunderkind has a signature style that combines oblique storytelling, chaotic mise-en-scène, and microscopic camerawork to muddle the senses and make us putty in her hands. She's perfected the technique with The Holy Girl, her second film. Seemingly more languid than her frantically chaotic debut, The Holy Girl ratchets up an emotional intensity that slowly builds through an accumulation of details. The wise viewer will keep the subtitle in mind: "The Temptation of Good – and the Evil It Causes." Not since Luis Buñuel's middle period has a filmmaker brought such forensic intelligence to bear on the intersection of religion and desire. Well, one other: note the name of Pedro Almodóvar in the credits as an executive producer.

Amalia (a magnetic María Alché) lives in the hotel her single mother runs. She's studying catechism with a group of her pals and is obsessed with a metaphysics of virtue and sin. When Amalia is groin-groped by a stranger on the street, she sees an omen. Recognizing the man among the visiting doctors, she scripts a sacred mission to save his soul. If this is Lolita, then Martel has restored the power balance of the original, for the girl holds the cards in this badly flawed deck. For Amalia, the sacred and the profane are fatally confused, and her mystical mission is dangerous to one and all.

The girls in Martel's universe are endlessly complex creatures with unspoken and unspeakable desires swirling in their uncharted depths. Adolescence is a pipe bomb tossed into a society of weak and flawed adults, with a long fuse of sexuality waiting to be lit. And Martel is there, on the inside, listening and watching as though she had happened on these characters rather than written them into being. Its her great strength as a writer-director, this pose of the wise but guileless observer. No wonder neither character nor audience sees the traps before they spring.

The Holy Girl reminds me of an eye doctor I once visited, who used wooden machines, antiquated even then, to retrain the eyes of people with vision disorders. I had a friend at the time who patronized someone who treated his ears by candling them, heating and draining the wax. "It's like I have a new stereo," he would gloat in that pre-iPod age. Martel's ingenious combination of extreme close-ups, unpredictable characters, and carefully constructed soundtracks does something similar, at a very high level; she produces a kind of synesthesia that sets off a visual and auditory rearrangement of its audience. The eyes and ears of her viewers are irrevocably retuned and recalibrated.

Last spring I sat in the Palais at Cannes watching The Holy Girl. As the girls swam across the pool and the doctors stalked the perimeter, I detected a whiff of chlorine and craned my neck, scanning the darkness for the source. Later I asked Martel how she was able to control to such an extent the synesthesia her sensory immersions produced. "That was a miracle," she insisted. Ah, the very word now being used by critics to describe Martel and her film. The Holy Girl, yes, is a miracle of cinematic transcendence.

'The Holy Girl' opens Fri/13 at Embarcadero Center Cinema, 1 Embarcadero Center, Promenade level, S.F. (415) 267-4893; and Act 1 and 2, 2128 Center, Berk. (510 464-5980. See Rep Clock, in Film listings, for show times.