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‘Colossal’ and ‘Lady Macbeth’ Tell Similar Stories of Violence and Empowerment at TIFF

Both Nacho Vigalondo’s monster movie, ‘Colossal,’ and William Oldroyd’s period piece, ‘Lady Macbeth,’ are solid, carefully-made films built around a stunning performance from their lead actors – Anne Hathaway and Florence Pugh, respectively – and both tell the story of a woman surrounded by men who try to control her. Rightly or wrongly, both films also seem to presume that the best way for women to be strong and empowered is through physical violence.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Last week, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) saw the world premieres of Nacho Vigalondo’s monster movie, Colossal, and William Oldroyd’s period piece, Lady Macbeth. Both of these are solid, carefully-made films built around a stunning performance from their lead actors – Anne Hathaway and Florence Pugh, respectively – and both tell the story of a woman surrounded by men who try to control her. Rightly or wrongly, both films also seem to presume that the best way for women to be strong and empowered is through physical violence.

In Colossal, Gloria (Anne Hathaway) struggles with problematic drinking, got fired from her job, and kicked out of her boyfriend’s apartment. She moves back to her home town to get her life together, but soon discovers that she’s psychically linked to a monster that appears in South Korea every morning to blindly stumble into skyscrapers, leaving a trail of chaos and destruction in its wake. This sounds like a completely bizarre and preposterous premise, but it works really well in the film. At first, it seems that Gloria will have to pull back on her drinking and behave in a more responsible way to deal with the monster, but it slowly becomes clear that there’s another antagonist in this story. At the risk of revealing one of the best twists in the film, it turns out that Gloria’s nice guy childhood friend, who initially seems destined to be her romantic interest, is actually a Nice Guy childhood friend – in that he secretly hates and fears women, and only pretends to be friends with them because he’s angling for sex. The second half of the film is about him getting increasingly vile and misogynist while she struggles to stand up to him.

At the screening I attended, Vigalondo explained that he’d been editing the film right up until the premiere and joked that all he could see were the mistakes he made. However, the mistakes don’t really show. There’s a little bit of fuzzy logic about the monster, and its origin story is built up to be more than it is but, overall, the film seems technically well-made and takes us on an understandable and unexpected emotional journey. The degree to which you enjoy this movie will be mediated by your Matrix quotient – meaning, if you were annoyed that Neo and Trinity killed a bunch of innocent people so they could look cool in The Matrix, you will be annoyed that Anne Hathaway’s monster kills a bunch of innocent people by drunkenly stumbling into a skyscraper. Colossal makes more of these deaths than The Matrix did, but not as much as it makes of the pain Gloria suffers herself.

That said, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Colossal and, even though I’m about to question the film’s use of violence as a path to power, this is a movie that deserves to land a distributor, so as many people can watch it as possible. There are interesting conversations to be had about the film, once it’s part of the cultural landscape.

Lady Macbeth is complicated, in that it’s an adaptation of an opera that was an adaptation of a Russian novel called Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which does not, itself, have anything to do with Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Set in England, in the 1860s, the film follows Katherine (Florence Pugh), a woman who marries into a modestly wealthy family that hates her. The first act of the film depicts Katherine’s life as an endurance test – physical discomfort, humiliation, isolation, boredom, sleep deprivation, celibacy – that will apparently go on forever. By the time the murders start – and there are lots of murders in this film – we’re on her side.

This is Oldroyd’s first feature film (written by Alice Birch), after working mostly in theatre and, although everything looks gorgeous, there’s an overall broadness to the movie that would work better on-stage. All of the physical violence in the film is blocked and shot in ways that reveal it as pantomime; every line of dialogue and sound effect is crisp and loud as though there’s a chance we might not hear it.

Katherine intentionally goes from being sympathetic to villainous over the course of the film, and there are unanswered questions about some events – including what looks like a possible gang rape. The best explanation for the story came from Naomi Ackie, the actor who plays Katherine’s servant, Anna. During a Q&A, Ackie explained that to her, Lady Macbeth is about the choices people have when they’re oppressed, and how intersectionality leaves each of the characters with different options. The option Katherine chooses is to kill anyone who threatens her freedom and – without giving away too much – Gloria eventually resorts to violence in Colossal, too.

On the one hand, it feels great to watch these women fight back against men who threaten violence or have used physical violence to make them subservient – I got really emotional watching Colossal, and appreciated the care Vigalondo took developing the situation and exploring the misogynist undercurrents in what initially appears to be harmless behavior. There’s also a great moment in Lady Macbeth where Katherine stares at her father-in-law impassively during an outburst, and you can tell it’s because she’s already planned his death – it’s a much-welcome change after watching her bow to his wishes earlier in the film. On the other hand, watching these women meet violence with violence reinforces the idea that the best or only way to have power is to beat or kill someone else, which is an idea that’s bad for women (and many men) in the long run.

Men’s domination of women has historically hinged on physical strength and threats or deeds of violence. Although both Colossal and Lady Macbeth seem to propose that the best way for women to end their oppression is also through violence, the biggest gains women have made collectively in society didn’t happen because we started to beat men up – they followed from cultural change that placed more value on freedom, democracy, and equality. Some may argue that it’s important for women to learn to physically defend themselves, but the best way for us to ensure that women are treated like people rather than property is through dismantling intersecting systems of oppression and claiming an equal share of political, economic, and social power. Until we have that, women’s rights are an experiment that men can end at any time.

As committed to empowering women as both of these movies are – and I don’t doubt their commitment – the road to power on-screen looks a lot different than the road to power we’ve taken and probably should continue to take in life.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV, and video games on her blog.

The Sister as Revenant in Brian De Palma’s ‘Sisters’

‘Sisters’ displays an early concern with women’s liberation in mainstream American film (De Palma’s collaborator on the screenplay was Louisa Rose). Many of the film’s social complaints remain liberal talking points today: that police can be motivated by racism, that the legal institution can subject women to excessive scrutiny, and that the medical-psychiatric institution remains patriarchal and sexist in its diagnosing and treatment of women. Yet the film’s intersections with disability are more complicated.

This guest post written by Stefan Sereda appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood. | Spoilers ahead.

Classical Hollywood horror cinema often positioned its monsters as threats to a conservative social order represented on film through family and the home. King Kong snatches Ann Darrow away from Jack Driscoll’s apartment and Dracula lures women from their intended husbands. In Cat People (directed by Jacques Tourner, 1942), a woman fails to consummate her marriage because sexual arousal turns her into a ferocious feline, and an adopted child brings a killer’s instincts to roost in The Bad Seed (directed by Mervyn LeRoy, 1956).

In the 1960s and 1970s, Women’s Liberation and the Sexual Revolution provoked a swell of reactionary horror films that reframe domestication as a potential trap that can destroy women and cause social fragmentation. Nightmarish expressions of Second Wave feminist sentiments abound. In Rosemary’s Baby (directed by Roman Polanski, 1968), a newlywed (Mia Farrow) suffers spousal rape in a plot to breed the Antichrist. The Stepford Wives (directed by Bryan Forbes, 1975) depicts husbands replacing their wives with obedient fembots. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (directed by Tobe Hooper, 1974) locates its horror in a disturbing symbolic inversion of the American family homestead.

Brian De Palma’s 1973 film Sisters is a post-Psycho (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), pre-Halloween (directed by John Carpenter, 1978) proto-slasher that belongs to this loose cycle of liberationist horror cinema. For an early-1970s film directed and co-written by a man, according to journalist and film critic Julie Salamon some critics deemed a “perverse misogynist,” Sisters displays an early concern with women’s liberation in mainstream American film (De Palma’s collaborator on the screenplay was Louisa Rose). Many of the film’s social complaints remain liberal talking points today: that police can be motivated by racism, that the legal institution can subject women to excessive scrutiny, and that the medical-psychiatric institution remains patriarchal and sexist in its diagnosing and treatment of women. Yet the film’s intersections with disability are more complicated.

De Palma’s films have inspired protests from anti-porn feminists, but critics also champion his depictions of women and illustrate that his films are “about misogyny.” For example, Carrie (1976), a film feminist scholars both attack and defend, is a film about women’s internalized misogyny from its opening scene onward: it nonetheless passes the Bechdel Test, privileges a woman’s perspective in almost every scene, and represents a broad range of women characters, including career women.

A rote observation about De Palma is that he takes up the mantle of Hitchcockian themes and motifs: guilt, suspicion, repression, voyeurism, psychoanalytic critique, and sexualized violence. Sisters maintains this trend in De Palma’s Hitchcockian oeuvre. De Palma hired Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann to compose the nerve-wracking score. Moreover, Sisters rewrites Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and the pseudo-gothic thriller, Psycho, from a post-counterculture historical context.

Sisters grounds its thematic appraisal of domesticity within literal and metaphorical depictions of sisterhood, wherein the sisters are foils for one another. Margot Kidder plays twin Quebecois sisters Danielle and Dominique. As the plot unravels, Danielle and Dominique are conceived as Canada’s first conjoined twins, who are now separated. The film introduces the viewer to Danielle, the seemingly “sweet” sister with whom De Palma aligns our sympathies: Danielle is pleasant, flirtatious, and cast as the survivor of past trauma and an aggressive ex-husband. As an immigrant from French Canada, she is also positioned as an ambiguous “other” in a narrative that film critic and producer Steven Jay Schneider describes in The Horror Film as a “powerful depiction of monstrous female sexuality.” In this respect, the film is a sister-narrative to Psycho. The only way to conduct a proper post-mortem on Sisters — a deliberately nonsensical film — is to spoil its plot twists, so this would be a good time to pause and watch the film online.

The film frames women’s expected domestication, reified through decades of Hollywood cinema, as a concern from the opening sequence onward. Model/actress Danielle meets Phillip (Lisle Wilson), an African-American man, on the set of an exploitative Candid Camera-style television game show, Peeping Toms. The exploitative show’s stereotyping attitudes are cemented when the host gives Danielle a set of cutlery for her participation, and Phillip, dinner for two at New York’s African Room. Phillip grimaces, but agrees to bring Danielle along at her behest.

Over dinner, Danielle insists she is not a Women’s Liberationist. Soon after, her stalker ex-husband, Emil (William Finley), pleads with her to leave with him. Emil is dragged away, and Danielle, now inebriated, convinces Phillip to escort her to her Staten Island apartment, where she seduces him (it is worth noting here that interracial sexual relationships, though becoming more frequent in independent films such as Sisters, were still seldom depicted in Hollywood films in 1973). As Phillip caresses his way up Danielle’s leg, Herrmann’s soundtrack escalates to a grating cacophony and the camera zooms in to reveal a large scar on Danielle’s hip. The soundtrack suggests this scar is a source of anxiety and monstrosity. What follows is a narrative about trauma and ability, or disability, both physical and psychological. At its root is Danielle’s desire for normalcy, which she interprets as heteronormativity and motherhood.

After Danielle and Phillip sleep together, she awakens from a dream that produces moans both tormented and orgasmic. She proceeds to the bathroom, where she grips her womb in pain and places two red tablets on the sink’s basin. The pills provide a stark contrast to the apartment’s virginal, all-white color scheme (Danielle typically wears white, as well). Since these pills keep Danielle functioning and therefore —as it is later revealed — liberated, they are somewhat analogous to the contemporaneous emergence of birth control technology and its role in the Sexual Revolution. Before Danielle can take the pills, she hears a woman’s voice calling her name and enters the corridor, where she argues with her sister, Dominique, off-screen. The argument, wherein Dominique labels Danielle “disgusting” for bringing a man home, wakes up Phillip, who proceeds to the bathroom and inadvertently knocks Danielle’s pills down the sink without realizing this blunder. Danielle assures Phillip her sister only stopped by because it is their birthday, and sends him out to renew her prescription. While Phillip stops to buy Dominique and Danielle a birthday cake, Danielle realizes she is out of medication, and, panicking, calls Emil for help.

When Phillip returns, he grabs a knife from Danielle’s new cutlery set and brings her the cake while she is asleep under some blankets. Phillip’s last words are benevolently patronizing, uttered after Danielle grasps the knife: “Now you know you’re not supposed to cut the cake until you blow out the candles.” Danielle, in a moment of rage, pounces on Phillip and stabs him to death.

In this first split screen sequence, Danielle’s neighbor, Grace (Jennifer Salt), a liberal investigative journalist, witnesses the murder through her window and phones the police. The detectives predictably bungle the investigation, preferring to waste critical time railing against Grace for writing an op-ed where she called police racist “pigs.” The senior detective immediately assumes Grace is imagining things, while his partner reveals his racism when he tells her, “Take it easy, lady, these people are always stabbing each other.” The police are only motivated to investigate because they fear Grace will give them more bad press. Meanwhile, the viewer watches in split screen as Danielle wakes up and Emil arrives. Emil promptly discovers the murder, but Danielle has no memory of the event. Instead, she whispers, “Dominique, what have you done?” Emil appears shocked by Dominique’s presence, but he exerts a patriarchal control over the situation, shaking Danielle out of her catatonia and telling her, significantly, “Put on some makeup. It must look as though nothing has happened.” In a scene reminiscent of Norman cleaning up after “Mother” commits murder in Psycho, Emil helps Danielle clean the apartment and stash the corpse in a fold-out sofa (if that sounds implausible, De Palma films this action in one shot to demonstrate it is possible to hide a body this way). He avoids running into the police with a garbage bag full of blood-soaked rags by seconds.

Casual and institutional sexism repeatedly thwart Grace’s attempts at investigation. When Grace and the detectives confront Danielle, the police sympathize with Danielle, and the viewer can appreciate why they would: Danielle is charming, demure, beautiful but modest — a traditionally feminine woman who represents herself as a victim, the lonely divorcee. Grace, on the other hand, is anything but her namesake: shrill-voiced, abrasive, accusatory, and clumsy enough to drop the cake she discovers, destroying a key piece of evidence. The police threaten to charge Grace unless she drops the matter.

Grace stubbornly refuses to abandon the investigation, and viewers can assume this is partly an act of rebellion against her mother, who belittles her journalism career and berates her about finding a husband. Eventually, Grace confirms her suspicion that Danielle had a sister, about whom she is lying. While watching a documentary, Grace hears a psychiatrist in patriarchal clergy robes describe Dominique as “disturbed” and Danielle “sweet” and “so responsive,” but says the latter can only be that way because of her sister. After, Dominique is said to have died during an emergency surgery that separated the conjoined twins.

De Palma once responded to accusations of misogyny with a quip: “I’m always attacked for having an erotic, sexist approach — chopping up women, putting them in peril. I’m making suspense movies! What else is going to happen to them?” (Caputi 92). While this blasé attitude might not have won him more feminist fans, Sisters’ tragic denouement has a Brechtian pedagogy meant to gall and galvanize liberal viewers.

When Grace raids the psychiatric hospital where Emil conceals Danielle, the investigation falls apart. After an encounter with a patient who shrieks because Grace asks to use the telephone (the incident presents another metaphor for women obsessively seeking false security in a domestic space), Emil easily convinces his staff that Grace is another deluded patient who needs sedating. Grace is dosed (as in Rosemary’s Baby, wherein Rosemary is restrained on a bed before being penetrated and drugged with a needle, the incident plays out like rape), and Emil begins to use hypnosis to convince her there was no murder.

The sequence that follows is metacinematic, unreliably narrated, and only logical in a surrealist sense: Grace imagines herself as Dominique, attached to Danielle, in the documentary she had viewed on the sisters. Therein, it is revealed that Danielle was traumatized as a child when others called her “freak.” Later, in the context of an inappropriate relationship with her doctor, Emil, she developed a strong desire to have a baby. Unfortunately, Dominique was always there to observe Danielle’s sexual relationship with Emil. In a surgery scene that plays out like a black mass attended by a host of spectators, Emil separates the sisters using a cleaver from the cutlery set Danielle was given at the beginning of the film. The film’s metaphor imagines Danielle and Grace as sisters, with women’s domestication and innate urges for procreation being to blame for career women’s suffering. For Danielle to have the “normal” life she desires, it is necessary to excise less “feminine” qualities and pursuits, as represented through Grace and Dominique.

After this sequence, Danielle is provoked by traumatic memories. Emil assures her he loves her and kisses her, which of course triggers her to murder him. Since the police now know Danielle is a murderess, they are ready to believe Grace. Unfortunately, Grace has been brainwashed by a patriarchal representative of the psychiatric establishment and she refuses to cooperate. She tells the police “there was no murder” from what looks like a teenager’s bedroom at her mother’s house, having regressed to a childish state where she now depends on domestication.

As with Rosemary’s Baby, Danielle’s desire for motherhood becomes a site of horror. Similar to Irena (Simone Simon) in Cat People and Carol (Catherine Deneuve) in Repulsion (directed by Roman Polanski, 1965), Danielle’s murderous tendencies erupt when she is sexually aroused or confronted. And like Norman Bates, she dissociates herself from the act of murder by adopting the persona of a dead female family member that once kept her bound in place. Sisters is, perhaps, ableist in how it associates congenital disability with horror. Yet Danielle’s monstrosity is located more in the discrepancy between her desire to fulfill a “normal” feminine role by denying her disability and the mental illness this provokes after her sister’s death. In De Palma’s film, the sister is the revenant reminding Danielle of the expense paid for her traditionally feminine identity, her liberated actions, and her domestic desires. Since Danielle’s desire for a child preempts Dominique’s accidental death (or murder), the opening credit sequence is more harrowing in retrospect: twin sisters, developing in utero.

References: Caputi, Jane (June 15, 1987). The Age of Sex Crime. Popular Press. p. 92.

Dr. Stefan Sereda is a writer/researcher with a PhD in English and Film Studies and an MA in Literature with a focus on gender and genre. His publications on American cinema and global media have appeared in A Companion to Martin Scorsese, The Memory Effect, Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, the Directory of World Cinema: Africa, and ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.

My Sister’s Keeper: When Sisterhood Sours in Horror Films

But there’s also a darker side to sisterhood, where rivalries take violent turns and where bonds are almost too strong, superseding everything else including reality. When sisters are pushed to the extremes, when women don’t meet society’s expectations, what does this tell us about the constraints on women to conform to idealized versions of femininity and sisterhood? Are bad sisters just failures or are they simply women with complicated narratives that a patriarchal society doesn’t allow room for?

This guest post written by Jamie Righetti appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood. | Spoilers ahead.

[Trigger warning: discussion of suicide and abuse]

The beauty of sisterhood has been extolled in cinema for generations, where undeniable bonds and deep love carry women through a multitude of obstacles and life-altering events. In A League of Their Own (1992), the rivalry between Dottie (Geena Davis) and Kit (Lori Petty) drives them to achieve greatness when the country needed it most and their undeniable love for one another helps them mend their relationship in the long run. In Eve’s Bayou (1997), two sisters, Eve (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) and Cisely (Meagan Good), take turns sheltering each other from the truth behind a dark childhood trauma and help each other heal after death of their father. Despite the variety of stories, the message is clear: the love between sisters can overcome anything. It is a powerful, transcendent bond that can even be inexplicitly supernatural at times.

There’s possibly no greater example of female sibling rivalry gone wrong than Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), a Robert Aldrich film about two feuding sisters living in a crumbling mansion, which was fueled in part by the notorious rivalry between stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. In the film’s opening sequence, the stage is set for conflict. Baby Jane (Davis) is a child star and adored by the girls’ father, but later in life, it is Blanche (Crawford) who finds success in Hollywood as Jane’s star wanes. One evening, the Hudson sisters return to their mansion and when one sister gets out to open the gate, the other tries to run her over. Although we cannot see who is behind the wheel, the accident leaves Blanche permanently paralyzed.

Blanche now uses a wheelchair and Jane’s mental health declines, her behavior having grown more erratic over the years. Jane’s desperate attempts to regain her childhood stardom are in many ways directly tied to the death of her father, but her adoration (which isn’t matched by Blanche) also hints at sexual abuse. It is this correlation between success and warped love that causes her to lash out at her sister, whose success she sees as the reason her own stardom ended, which in turn brought an end to the abuse that she had categorized as love. The seeds of bitterness and dysfunction run deep for both sisters.

In the end, we discover that Blanche endures Jane’s senselessly cruel behavior because she was the one driving the car that fateful evening and it was Jane, not Blanche, who was pinned against the gate and nearly killed. Blanche has endured decades of abuse as penance for her anger, choosing to keep the truth of the accident a secret not just to punish herself but to punish her sister as well by never revealing the truth behind the story and allowing Jane to believe she was capable of such a heinous act against her own sister. As a result, Jane unleashed a torrent of abuse on to Blanche. The downfall of the Hudson sisters did not come from faded stardom but from a sibling rivalry that warped itself into a vicious cycle of abuse in place of affection.

But just as bitterness can tear two sisters apart, love can also distort into an obsession so strong that it clouds reality and puts everyone else at risk. In Sisters (1973), director Brian De Palma continues his early career homage to Hitchcock with a twist on Rear Window (1954), as well as a small nod to Vertigo (1958), with the story of Danielle (Margot Kidder), a beautiful model sheltering her dangerous sister, Dominique (also played by Kidder). The film opens with a hidden camera game show, where an unwitting salesman, Phillip (Lisle Wilson), is pranked by Danielle. He wins dinner for two and decides to take her out that evening. The two make it back to Danielle’s Staten Island apartment. Although they are menaced by Danielle’s ex-husband, Emil (William Finley), they spend the night together. In the morning, Phillip overhears Danielle arguing with her sister, Dominique, in the bedroom. Danielle is unwell and asks Phillip to pick up a prescription for her as well as a birthday cake, so she can celebrate her sister’s birthday. Upon his return, Phillip is attacked by a frenzied Dominique, who stabs him to death in the living room while Danielle is sick in the bathroom.

The murder is witnessed by one of Danielle’s neighbors, Grace (Jennifer Salt), a journalist known (and disliked) for exposing police corruption. In the film’s more overt Hitchcock homage, Grace struggles to get the police to take her claims seriously, and when they finally do search Danielle’s apartment – which Emil hastily cleaned up – they find no trace of Phillip’s body or Dominique. Although the audience knows the truth, Grace’s sanity is continuously called into question as she tries to uncover the truth about what happened. Finally, Grace discovers the truth about Danielle and Dominique: the two were Canada’s first conjoined twins, however Dominique died shortly after an operation to separate the two women. Armed with this revelation, Grace tracks down Danielle, who is once again under the control of her ex-husband, and realizes that Danielle has split her own personality, assuming the identity of her long-dead twin as a means of keeping her memory alive.

Although Sisters subtly highlights Danielle’s condition, by showing her reliance on pills and her violent withdrawal shortly before Phillip’s death, in many ways, the film is less about a diagnosed mental illness and more about Danielle’s inability to cope after the loss of her twin. For Danielle, and in turn “Dominique,” there is no greater intimacy than the one shared between twin sisters. Although a part of Danielle yearns to break free and live her life as she wishes, as evidenced by her date with Phillip, ultimately she is powerless to the bond she shares with her twin, which will take over to eradicate any threat. By quantifying Danielle and Dominique as conjoined twins, there’s an added sense of symbolism – the two are quite literally part of each other; even after the death of Dominique, part of her would inevitably live on in Danielle.

The powerful, protective bond between sisters is a theme that is also explored in A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), a South Korean horror film written and directed by Jee-woon Kim. Based on a Korean folk tale, the film introduces Soo-mi (Su-jeong Lim), a young girl questioned by doctors about an unnamed event which caused her significant trauma. Although she refuses to answer any of their questions, she is allowed to return home to her family’s large estate where she lives with her father (Kap-su Kim), her younger sister Soo-yeon (Geun-young Moon) and her stepmother (Jung-ah Yum). Although the film initially brings in a supernatural element — bloody ghosts and strange noises set us up for a ghost story — there is also a very real conflict between the sisters and their stepmother. Family photos reveal that the girls’ hatred of their stepmother is rooted in the death of their own mother. Their stepmother was a nurse who worked with their father and worked as an in-home nurse while their mother was sick. In turn, Soo-mi finds vicious bruises on her sister’s arms, indicating that the hatred is quite mutual.

Soo-mi becomes increasingly protective of her younger sister, who seems to be the target of their stepmother’s aggression. When Soo-yeon finds their pet bird has been killed, she goes into her stepmother’s room where she finds photos of herself that have been defaced. Her stepmother then grabs her and locks her in a giant armoire, ignoring the girl’s terrified pleas to be released. Finally, Soo-mi releases her sister, begging her forgiveness for not hearing her cries for help. When Soo-mi confronts her father about Soo-yeon’s ordeal, he blames her for the problems and drops a bombshell: Soo-yeon is dead. Soo-mi refuses to accept this and her father decides to send her back to the institution which she was released from earlier in the film.

But instead of just mirroring one sister’s inability to process her grief, which is at the center of Sisters, A Tale of Two Sisters offers us one more twist. It is also revealed that Soo-mi is not only seeing her dead sister, but she has split her personality and is also acting as her abusive stepmother. The film’s final sequence offers insight into Soo-mi’s fractured psyche. After the abrupt marriage between her father and stepmother, Soo-yeon discovers the body of her biological mother, who was terminally ill, hanging in the armoire. While attempting to save her mother, the armoire collapses onto Soo-yeon, who is slowly suffocating and being crushed to death. Her stepmother comes to investigate the source of the crash and notices Soo-yeon’s hand reaching out of the tipped armoire but before she can intervene, she is dragged into an argument with Soo-mi, who inadvertently facilitates her sister’s death by arguing with her stepmother. Soo-mi’s grief makes it impossible to accept her sister’s death, because by doing so she must accept her own role in it. To avert this and to demonstrate her love for Soo-yeon, she not only mentally resurrects her sister but she also assumes the identity of her stepmother, acting as both savior and torturer. Soo-mi’s ritual is almost akin to self-flagellation, where she instigates a cycle of imagined abuse and rescue to try and blur a reality in which she was too late.

While the inability to process the death of a loved one is very real, distorting both love and grief allow horror films to explore and subvert traditional gender roles, particularly where women are concerned. Both Danielle and Soo-mi could be considered good sisters because they are devoted to the memory of their dead sisters. They demonstrate the unbreakable bond that sisters can have, but in doing so, they destroy their own view of reality, unleashing violence on both themselves and those around them. Furthermore, by role-playing her dead sister’s savior, Soo-mi is adopting the maternal, nurturing instincts expected of her as a woman, but in the context of A Tale of Two Sisters, this becomes a symptom of her mental illness and eventually leads to her institutionalization. Likewise, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? not only warps sibling rivalry into something unhealthy, but it also allows the Hudson sisters to break free of the stereotypical constraints of both sisterhood and womanhood by allowing them to be abusive and even murderous towards one another. In doing so, the women are able to step away from acceptable gender roles (particularly for the film’s time period), which is something normally confined to masculine depictions of a Cain and Abel-esque brotherhood.

While sisterhood is something to be celebrated and has given us memorable depictions of love and life-long devotions, we can still glean important lessons and commentary from its darker side about our own limits as women who must juggle and adapt to multiple roles within an ever-changing society.

Jamie Righetti is an author and freelance film critic from New York City. Her work has been featured on Film School Rejects and Daily Grindhouse, as well as in Belladonna magazine. Jamie is the host of the horror podcast, ScreamBros, and she has just released her debut novel, Beechwood Park, which is currently available on Amazon. You can follow her on Twitter @JamieRighetti.

The Women Men Rescue (or Choose Not To): ‘The Witness’ and ‘Disorder’

Saving a beautiful woman from danger is such a pervasive male fantasy that right now, no matter where you are you could probably see an example of this trope by randomly flipping through channels or wandering into a multiplex. But what if the man was never able to save the woman? Or what if he has problems of his own that keep him from being a stereotypical hero?

Written by Ren Jender.

[Trigger Warning: discussion of explicit, fatal violence against women and rape]

You’d never know from watching movies that statistically men are much more likely to harm women than rescue them. Saving a beautiful woman from danger is such a pervasive male fantasy that right now, no matter where you are, you could probably see an example of this trope by randomly flipping through channels or wandering into a multiplex. But what if the man was never able to save the woman? Or what if he has problems of his own that keep him from being a stereotypical hero? Two new films, respectively James D. Solomon’s documentary The Witness and Alice Winocour’s French thriller Disorder, attempt to answer these questions.

The Witness tracks Bill Genovese, a Vietnam veteran and a person with an amputation who uses a wheelchair, as he tries to find out 40 to 50 years later (the film took a decade to make) what really happened the night his older sister, Kitty Genovese, was stabbed to death (and although it’s not included in the film also raped by her murderer) in front of her own Queens apartment building in 1964. Kitty Genovese’s killing became the stuff of front page headlines and sociology classes when an apocryphal story in The New York Times stated that 37 (the number was later amended to 38) of her neighbors, awakened by her screams, saw her being stabbed from their bedroom windows but none called the police or offered any other help which might have saved her life.

The truth, uncovered in more recent articles is: although neighbors heard her screams, nearly none of them knew what was going on (some thought she and her killer were a drunk married couple having an argument) especially since the scene was quiet and Kitty was out of sight for some time between her murderer’s initial attack (interrupted when a neighbor shouted at him through the window to get away from her) and when he fatally wounded her (after which a woman neighbor and friend of Kitty’s held her in her arms as she was dying).

The original news story was a manipulation of facts that made a compelling resume builder: Abe Rosenthal, who later became the long-reigning executive editor at The New York Times wrote a sensationalistic book based on the fabricated story. When Bill interviews Rosenthal, he still insists the original account was the correct one. Some other journalists who covered the story when it was still new, like the late Mike Wallace, are more philosophical. “It was a fascinating story,” he says, one that was apparently too good to let the facts get in the way.

What actually happened is more complex. One surviving neighbor Bill interviews on camera says, “I heard someone yelling, ‘Help, help,’ and I called the police,” though no records of her call are on police logs. As Bill explains to us in his narration, we don’t know if the station neglected to write down the call or if the woman is telling this story to make herself feel better about her own actions (or inaction) that night.

We also see, unlike in most narrative films, how uninterested some people are in the truth. Kitty’s killer, Winston Moseley (he has since died) who raped and killed at least one other woman and later, in an escape from prison, raped another and held hostages at gunpoint, refuses to meet with Bill and instead offers in a letter an obviously fictitious story about being framed. Moseley’s son, who was 7 at the time of the murder, is a minister who wears a shiny cross, but seems to believe another of his father’s stories (that contradicts everything we know about the case): that Kitty called him a racial slur and he snapped. The son also seems unwilling to accept that his father was responsible for the other murder (which, like Kitty’s, he confessed to after he was arrested for stealing a television) in which he set fire to his victim while she was still alive. Instead, the son states that, for years, he and the rest of family had believed that Kitty was related to the infamous New York Mafia Genoveses (she was not).

Because most of the memories of Kitty and the analysis of her death come from men, we feel a little removed from her. When one man talks about how his mother (the woman who held Kitty in her arms as she died in the hallway) often had coffee with Kitty and would “talk about whatever women talk about,” it’s as emblematic of the film’s distanced viewpoint, as the blurry, nearly faceless image we see of Kitty in clips from an old home movie which are interspersed throughout the film.

Bill is in nearly every frame of the film’s live action — most of the recreated scenes are rendered in the delicate, evocative animation of The Moth Collective. Even as we see him moving in and out of his wheelchair, wearing gloves to pull himself up the stairs to an otherwise inaccessible apartment and narrating the film, he remains something of a mystery. Why does he wait to find out the real story until 40 years after his sister died? By the time he tracks down the witnesses who testified at the trial, most are long dead. One of the only insights into his mindset comes from his wife: “The choices that he made in his life were all related to the fact that no one helped his sister.”

Bill also has a willful obtuseness when he wonders why Kitty, whom he was close to, never came out to him at a time (she died five years before Stonewall) when people who told their families they were queer were disowned. Kitty being a fairly out queer person (in a highlight, after her partner, Mary Ann Zielonko, tells Bill that the patrons at the bar where she worked didn’t know Kitty was queer, two of them tell Bill everyone at the bar knew and considered her “one of the boys”) makes me wonder if Karl Ross, one of the only witnesses who did see what was happening and was close enough to halt the murder, failed to do so because of homophobia — or a fear of police since he too may have been gay. Mary Ann says of Ross, “He knew us.” He owned the pet shop where Kitty bought a poodle for Mary Ann as an apology after an argument.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4irXjYt_LM”]

In Disorder, co-written and directed by Alice Winocour (the co-writer of Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Oscar-nominated Mustang), the woman in peril is Jessie (Diane Kruger), the wife of a shady and very wealthy businessman, and her protector is a paid bodyguard, Vincent (Matthias Schoenaerts) back from a stint in Afghanistan and suffering from PTSD (as well as some hearing loss, the doctor at the beginning tells him — and us).

We see Vincent try to do work as he deals with the sounds (all the electronic beeps and boops of modern life) and sights that trigger him. Wariness is actually part of his job description, but at first we’re unsure if Vincent’s has more to do with his internal struggles than it does with anything going on around him. Silly us: this film is a thriller. Of course the main guy’s paranoia is justified.

The film manages to squeeze a surprising amount of tension out of a not-terribly-original situation before its first violent incident (which is punctuated, stunningly, by a cracked windshield and a brief blackout) but falls apart soon afterward. The film has lots of overheard conversations and pieces of information that never really come together in coherent form, which might reflect what a paid protector would overhear and understand but doesn’t really engage the audience. The violent aggressors are the opposite of a menace in their cute, black, ninja outfits and masks. No matter what Vincent’s skills as a fighter (never impaired by psychological problems so obvious that Jessie asks his coworker directly, “What’s wrong with him?”) always flatten them, so the action becomes monotonous.

Winocour’s film was apparently influenced by her suffering PTSD from a traumatic childbirth experience (she and her daughter are fine now), a phenomenon women I’ve known have also experienced, but something I have never seen captured on film. I desperately wished Disorder was about women’s trauma instead of the tired cliché of a male soldier’s suffering. The film also doesn’t give us any insight into Jessie’s point of view. She looks great in the backless floral evening dress she wears to a party early in the film, but in every scene she is so much an object she might as well be tied in pink ribbon. This lack of attention to the character is especially shocking and disappointing because Winocour co-wrote Mustang, an instant feminist classic that is flawlessly attuned to its girl protagonists.

Additionally the husband and his cohorts are all from the Middle East: the only person of Middle-Eastern descent who doesn’t seem sinister is Ali, Jessie’s Keane-eyed, curly-haired, young son. France’s traditional anti-Arab sentiment and more recent anti-Muslim policies (on the same beaches where Jessie and Ali frolic) make the ethnicity of the bad guys seem not strictly coincidental and more than a little racist. Skip this film and see Mustang (again) instead.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMThvaCTAm0″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘The Neon Demon’: Objectification and Rape Culture

‘The Neon Demon’ brings to light the dual narcissism of our culture: the simultaneous, reciprocal reality created when consumers come into contact with images. The images exist so long as we look at them, and all Refn has done is reify our culture’s unhealthy obsession… I’m glad for ‘The Neon Demon,’ because it solidifies something that was already there: a hundred ornate mirrors reflecting back a society complicit in rape culture.

This guest post is written by Holly Thicknes.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and rape culture]

The Neon Demon threw up a lot of questions when it regurgitated Elle Fanning’s eyeball.

Yes, Nicolas Winding Refn made a surrealistic film about a 16 year old It-Girl model who gets slowly engulfed by the horrific monster that is the fashion industry via a bunch of envious flesh-eating model competitors. It’s the Donald Trump card of controversy at cinemas right now. But it also – pretty neatly, despite its gory appearance – epitomizes a society that is at once compelled and revolted by its need to consume.

Refn is obviously obsessed with women. He’s in awe of them. He thinks they’re intangibly beautiful. His entire filmic career can be seen as an expression of his distraction with how the female body differs from the male, and how that inspires violence. Jealousy, protectiveness, impotency: it’s all there in the scopophilic text of his films, skirting around the ankles of his uber-masculine figurines that dance perfect executions of violent, sexual acts.

It’s no wonder his latest film, a departure from the likes of Drive and Only God Forgives in that its central character is a woman, but in which his obsession shines through stronger than ever, has been deemed by many a gross, misogynistic ululation, or else pure unashamed spectacle. I can’t help but wonder if, had a heterosexual woman made a neo-porn movie detailing all of her perverse, beautiful desires, anyone would be eager to finance it. But I don’t begrudge Refn for making it, just as I don’t begrudge Hitchcock’s unapologetic spunking of his inner most fantasies on cinema’s walls. It’s not about limiting human creativity, censoring what could be deemed a negative influence or pointing the finger at what someone truly feels.

The Neon Demon brings to light the dual narcissism of our culture: the simultaneous, reciprocal reality created when consumers come into contact with images. The images exist so long as we look at them, and all Refn has done is reify our culture’s unhealthy obsession – what he himself is unhealthily obsessed with.

I’m glad for The Neon Demon, because it solidifies something that was already there: a hundred ornate mirrors reflecting back a society complicit in rape culture.

Reducing someone to an object makes it easier to harm them. More than this — it incites violence. Rape culture is a culture that dehumanizes. It normalizes rape and abuse while simultaneously blaming rape and sexual assault victims/survivors for their actions and behaviors.

This is embedded in the fabric of The Neon Demon. It sets up a gorgeously glowing, electronically scored, Americana world in which beauty “isn’t everything – it’s the only thing,” and women strive to mold themselves into non-human visions. The predatory danger of this nightmarish place, which young Jesse (Elle Fanning) is so keen to be part of, is crucial to the first part of the film, in which Keanu Reeves plays a rapist motel owner by the name of Hank, preying on young disenfranchised girls who are forced to live there. As Jesse presses her ear to the wall of her room and listens to the 13-year-old girls being raped next door with tears streaming down her face, the margins of her power close tightly around her. She is reduced to nothing but a porcelain doll – her beauty and youth her only bargaining tools of worth.

But, alas, every effort the first half of the film makes to incredulously depict moments of degradation and objectification – so promisingly linked directly to rape in the above scene — melts into nothing. It is disappointingly superseded by what it sees, like a magpie destined to be drawn from one shiny artifact to the next. Refn gets entirely distracted by the surface of the movie, pushing the mesmerizing spectacle to its all-consuming limit and in doing so, dissolving all of its efforts towards saying something interesting, memorable and, crucially, progressive.

Perhaps it is enough to address the link between objectification and rape at all, and Refn’s second-act descent into style obsession — there are some painfully drawn-out shots of pure fantasy indulgence — only reiterates his pointing out how far our image illness has gone. But somehow, I don’t think so. I feel it has the effect of switching off swaths of audiences who find themselves in the middle of one of Refn’s wet dreams. The film negates its previous commentary by becoming hypnotized by its own evil.

We cannot blame Refn for articulating an ugly truth. We are all complicit in our culture. If the eyeball-eating scene is the only one that survives The Neon Demon, let it be not for its shock factor, but because it fills us with as much disgust as do rape culture and our own mass consumption of women’s bodies.

Holly Thicknes is a freelance film critic and editor of female-focused film blog Girls On Film. She lives and works in London, studies printmaking, and helps organize themed short film events for Shorts On Tap. She is particularly interested in the ways in which films help people carve out spaces for themselves in an increasingly lonely society. You can follow Girls On Film on Twitter @girlsonfilmLDN.

‘The World Is Not Enough’ and the “Believability” of Dr. Christmas Jones

Dr. Jones went from being a promising step forward for Bond girls to one of the more maligned female characters of the franchise. … And this is what is the most disappointing thing about Dr. Jones. She’s a tough-talking woman whose best moments in the film come when she grows impatient with Bond’s testosterone-driven idiocy and counters his quips with her own formidable sarcasm, yet in the end, she’s just like any of those earlier Bond girls that Denise Richards dismissed as lacking depth…

This guest post written by Lee Jutton appears as part of our theme week on Women Scientists.

The character of the Bond girl is nearly as iconic as that of James Bond himself. After all, one of MI6 Agent 007’s defining features — and indeed, one of his biggest weaknesses, one that his enemies exploit time and time again — is his love of the opposite sex. Over the course of 24 films spanning 54 years, Bond has met his match — whether it be intellectually, sexually or a combination of both — in numerous women. While some seem to exist only as a pretty face and body for the audience to ogle as Bond utters some his infamous double entendres, many others stand on their own as vibrant, complicated characters. These are women with their own inner lives, their own professions, their own reasons for being beyond just being eye candy. However, that doesn’t mean they aren’t still conventionally attractive; the more modern version of the Bond girl often has brains, but you better bet she still has beauty, too.

The World Is Not Enough is a perfectly acceptable James Bond adventure directed by Michael Apted and starring Pierce Brosnan as 007. Story-wise, it doesn’t reach the heights of From Russia With Love or GoldenEye. But it’s an exciting, action-packed romp featuring a great Bond girl performance by Sophie Marceau as Elektra King, the daughter of an oil tycoon who is not what she seems. The film’s other female lead is a nuclear scientist with the unfortunate moniker of Dr. Christmas Jones, played by a 28-year-old Denise Richards. Previous Bond girls have included fellow agents (both allies and enemies), assassins, thieves, and heiresses (like Elektra King), not to mention the occasional pilot or fortune-teller; adding a nuclear scientist to their ranks could be viewed as a step forward into a more feminist future for the franchise. When asked about the role, Richards told BBC News that she felt the “brainy and athletic” Dr. Jones had more substance than Bond Girls of the past:

“The female roles now have a lot more depth – it’s more than just running around on Bond’s arm. Christmas is strong, intelligent and sassy and there’s an infectious one-upmanship and clever banter between her and James Bond.”

Unfortunately, not many people agreed with her. Upon The World is Not Enough’s release in 1999, a sizeable portion of the criticism was leveled at Dr. Jones — much of it bemoaning the curve-hugging wardrobe she sported throughout the film and insisting that Richards just wasn’t believable as a nuclear scientist. Richards ended up being the recipient of the Bond franchise’s first-ever Razzie Award, while a 2006 Entertainment Weekly list of the 10 worst Bond girls ranked her #1: “Let’s review: Denise Richards played Dr. Christmas Jones, a nuclear physicist who wore a tank top and hot pants. Bloody hell, even Q didn’t have a gadget to help Bond escape from that disaster.” Yet such skin-deep criticism of this character is unfair, and barely skims the surface as to why Dr. Jones went from being a promising step forward for Bond girls to one of the more maligned female characters of the franchise.

Dr. Jones is introduced about halfway through The World is Not Enough, when she emerges from a protective jumpsuit at a Russian intercontinental ballistic missile base in the middle of the Kazakhstan desert. Bond is posing as a Russian nuclear scientist to figure out what notorious terrorist Renard (Robert Carlyle) is doing at the base when he is introduced to Dr. Jones, an American nuclear physicist who has been recruited by the International Decommissioning Agency to help reduce Russia’s stockpile of nuclear weapons by dismantling its nuclear warheads. A tough job, to be sure, and Dr. Jones’ frosty reception of Bond at the base immediately establishes her as someone who has had to be very tough to get where she is in life. Despite being the head of the project, she is clearly not used to being taken seriously, and so overcompensates by being extra imperious towards the men around her to ensure that they keep in line. As Bond ogles her long, tanned limbs as she emerges from her jumpsuit clad in, yes, a tank top and shorts, his guide describes her as the base’s bit of “glimmer” and glumly notes, “Not interested in men. Take my word for it.” Naturally, Dr. Jones overhears, and immediately assumes that Bond’s intentions towards her are along the same lines:

Dr. Jones: Are you here for a reason, or are you just hoping for a glimmer?
Bond: Mikhail Arkov, Russian atomic energy department. And you are, miss?
Dr. Jones: Doctor Jones. Christmas Jones, and don’t tell me any jokes, I’ve heard them all.
Bond, innocently: I don’t know any doctor jokes.

It’s ironic that the character of a beautiful young scientist who is bitter about being dismissed by the men around her as just a bit of “glimmer” was then just as easily dismissed as such by audiences. One can argue that Dr. Jones’ costume caters to the male gaze and that yes, she might have been taken more seriously if she had worn a less-revealing wardrobe, rather than one reminiscent of another sexy scientist: archaeologist Lara Croft in Tomb Raider. Yet the notion that beautiful women should have to diminish their appearances in order to be taken seriously — especially when working in a traditionally male-dominated field — is just as outdated as anything in the Bond films of the 1960s. In 2006, Casino Royale addressed this issue in regards to Bond girl Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), an accountant from HM Treasury with a brusque manner of speech and a stylish but severe black suit that she wears like a suit of armor. Lynd is smart, tough and, because she’s a Bond girl, also incredibly beautiful. After a conversation about the art of reading one’s opponents during poker, Lynd then asks Bond to read her:

Lynd: What else can you surmise, Mr. Bond?
Bond: About you, Miss Lynd? Well, your beauty’s a problem. You worry you won’t be taken seriously.
Lynd: Which one can say of any attractive woman with half a brain.
Bond: True. But this one overcompensates by wearing slightly masculine clothing. Being more aggressive than her female colleagues. Which gives her a somewhat prickly demeanor, and ironically enough, makes it less likely for her to be accepted and promoted by her male superiors, who mistake her insecurities for arrogance.

Bond could also have been talking about Dr. Jones, who shares Lynd’s “prickly demeanor” and is viewed as arrogant by the men around her, who can’t believe that she isn’t interested in them. But, she never got the memo about the wardrobe, and one wonders that if Dr. Jones just bothered to put on a pair of slacks, perception of the character would have been different. Indeed, once one is able to suspend any disbelief that they might have over a nuclear scientist being capable of looking good in short-shorts, one realizes that Dr. Jones isn’t a terrible character — like many Bond girls from the series’ earlier era, she’s just a mediocre one.

Soon after Bond and Dr. Jones are introduced, they team up to track down Renard, who has run off with a stolen bomb. When they find the bomb hidden in an oil pipeline, they rocket in on an inspection car so that Dr. Jones can dismantle it, only to find out that half of the device’s plutonium is missing. Even though she doesn’t exactly enjoy spending substantial amounts of time running around with a man who only “speaks spy,” Dr. Jones is determined to help Bond track down the plutonium, noting, “The world’s greatest terrorist running around with six kilos of weapons-grade plutonium can’t be good. I gotta get it back, or someone’s gonna have my ass.” Bond, ever the gentleman, responds, “First things first.”

Now, Richards’ performance is not one that will go down in the history books as a landmark of great acting. But, it doesn’t deserve to be remembered as one of the worst, either. She does her best with the dialogue that is given to her — some of which is, as Richards mentioned when discussing the role, surprisingly sassy and snarky, reflecting her dismissive attitude towards Bond’s heavy-handed, uber-masculine tactics. The problem is, screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade just don’t give her enough, and when they do, it is too often bland statements of the obvious. It’s not that she isn’t believable as a nuclear scientist; it’s that after awhile, we just forget that she is one. Dr. Jones wastes more breath bluntly stating what is happening than she does explaining why; she’s the smartest person in the room for most of the movie, but is rarely given the chance to show it. I refer to this phenomenon as the Legolas Effect, named for the handsome elf archer played by Orlando Bloom in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Legolas rarely shows the wisdom of elves, and instead periodically utters pointless lines like “A diversion!” to remind the audience that he’s more than just a pretty piece of scenery placed in the background of Aragorn’s epic speeches. The same goes for Dr. Jones, who at one point screams, “It’s flooding!” while tons of water gushes into the submarine where she and Bond are waging war with Renard. Moments like this demolish any credibility that Dr. Jones built up while dismantling nuclear bombs and just make her look silly.

Speaking of silly: The World is Not Enough culminates in the stereotypical closing-credits sex scene with Bond that is chock full of the terrible Christmas jokes that Dr. Jones was so firmly against when she was introduced earlier in the movie, including what is the most cringeworthy closing line in the entire franchise: “I thought Christmas only comes once a year.” And this is what is the most disappointing thing about Dr. Jones. She’s a tough-talking woman whose best moments in the film come when she grows impatient with Bond’s testosterone-driven idiocy and counters his quips with her own formidable sarcasm, yet in the end, she’s just like any of those earlier Bond girls that Richards dismissed as lacking depth: she helplessly collapses into the arms of Bond and allows him to turn her into a punchline after all.

Watching The World is Not Enough seventeen years later, one can’t help but feel that both Dr. Jones and the woman who portrayed her were treated somewhat harshly. The role is unfortunately underwritten, and Richards’ performance in the film pales in comparison to that of the fiery Marceau (to see the two women side by side is to automatically see Richards in a less complimentary light), but to only describe the character’s failings in terms of her appearance says more about the audience than it does about the character. At this point, it should go without saying that scientists come in all shapes, sizes, colors and genders. Instead, our perceptions and prejudices have colored our negative impressions of Dr. Jones. While she isn’t one of the best Bond girls, she doesn’t deserve all of the worst-ever criticism that have been bestowed upon her — nor does Richards deserve the majority of the blame for why the character just doesn’t quite work.

Lee Jutton has directed short films starring a killer toaster, a killer Christmas tree, and a not-killer leopard. She previously reviewed new DVD and theatrical releases as a staff writer for Just Press Play. You can follow her on Medium for more film reviews and on Twitter for an excessive amount of opinions on German soccer.

‘Jurassic Park’: Resisting Gender Tropes

Yet in rewatching ‘Jurassic Park,’ it struck me that not only is Laura Dern’s Dr. Ellie Sattler a portrayal of a female scientist that is largely unseen in film, but she is, on numerous occasions, keenly aware of her gender and how this leads to her treatment.

This guest post written by Siobhan Denton appears as part of our theme week on Women Scientists.

Largely, Steven Spielberg is not known for overtly feminist portrayals of women in film. His work primarily focuses on similar motifs, chiefly that of father/son relationships. Yet in rewatching Jurassic Park, it struck me that not only is Laura Dern’s Dr. Ellie Sattler a portrayal of a female scientist that is largely unseen in film, but she is, on numerous occasions, keenly aware of her gender and how this leads to her treatment.

A paleobotanist, Dr. Ellie Sattler is clearly respected in her field of her work. Unlike previous female scientists, Ellie is not merely present to fulfill the Male Gaze, or to act as a plot device driving the narrative forward. Too often in film and TV, women scientists are there to either look attractive, or to simply proffer information to their male counterpart without little discussion. Here, Ellie is not only an expert in her field; she is respected by her colleagues.

Take for example the scene in which Ellie offers her ideas as to the reason the triceratops is ill.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JylK4HuKMvQ”]

Both Ellie and Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) are overcome with emotion, seeing the real life incarnation of a species to which they have spent their lives devoted to. But while Alan remains enamored, Ellie quickly acts, readily questioning the other men around her as a means to solve the reasons behind the illness of the animal. She does not act subservient or submissive. While Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) balks at the nature of Ellie’s investigations (determining the animal’s food source by inspecting its droppings), Ellie remains unfazed. Until this point, Ian has seen Ellie as a potential love interest, and while he acknowledged her education, he readily used his interactions with her to both showcase his own knowledge, and as an opportunity to educate Ellie. He attempts to highlight her intellectual failings because she, as a paleobotanist, does not have an understanding of chaos theory.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-mpifTiPV4″]

It is not until Ian witnesses Ellie demonstrating her own knowledge that he acknowledges that her function is not to simply act as a love interest, prompting him to remark upon her “tenacious” nature. This remark, acknowledged by Ellie’s colleague and partner Alan, is said both admiringly and begrudgingly — almost as if Ellie’s refusal to conform to the role of an archetypal love interest is both pleasing to see and frustrating.

It would have been easy for Dern’s character to have simply performed the role of love interest for the men in the film, and indeed the men in the film often try to impress upon her (and each other) that this is the role that she can perform. Ellie is aware of this, and makes this clear when Ian, again demonstrating his intellect, remarks, “God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.” Ellie’s wry response, in which she states, “Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth,” demonstrates her awareness of her gender and her status.

While Ellie is Grant’s partner, her narrative is not dependent on her involvement with him, and indeed, much of her narrative development takes place away from Grant. Returning to the compound while Grant is left to look after the children (arguably taking on the maternal role), Ellie is compelled to offer her help in order to reboot the system. She is aware of the dangers, but does so anyway. Her action, which she quickly undertakes with little debate, is decisive. She knows that her help is needed and despite her fears, she rapidly offers her services. Both Muldoon (Bob Peck) and Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson) accept Ellie’s participation without question. It is only John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), far older than the rest, who questions her decision. It is interesting that it is Hammond who expresses his displeasure with her involvement in the mission, largely given the noticeable generation gap between the three men in the room. Perhaps this is Spielberg’s attempt at noting the necessary progression in the treatment of women. Ellie herself explicitly draws attention to Hammond’s objections, bluntly stating, “Look … We can discuss sexism in survival situations when I get back.”

Ellie is willing to get involved and does not require rescuing, unlike her partner Alan, who spends the majority of the film both fulfilling a maternal role, but also hoping to find safety. Ellie is already safe through her decision to stay with the triceratops, but she is prepared to risk this in order to guarantee the safety of others. Ultimately, it is Ellie that rescues Alan, Lex (Ariana Richards), and Tim (Joseph Mazzello) as it is through her actions that they can retreat from danger.

Despite this, Alan does still attempt to protect Ellie, requesting that she try to reboot the system while he holds the velociraptor at bay. Ellie recognizes that Alan will not be able to hold the door on his own, so once again acts to help him, and in doing so fulfills the same role as him. As the pair hold the door together, their roles are no longer gendered. Notably, it is the other female character in the room that saves the four here. Lex’s superior technological knowledge successfully reboots the system, meaning that she, along with Ellie, has helped to save those remaining on the island.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFJekvpaua4″]

Importantly, Ellie is not an overtly sexualized character nor is she there to serve as simple set decoration; her clothes and styling are functional and appropriate to her job. She is allowed to be intelligent and brave without acting hysterical or panicked. The film affords her a fully developed, engaging, and interesting role.

Given that such a representation can be present in a successful film, it seems even more of a misnomer that so few female scientists are depicted on-screen. As has been noted, the original Jurassic Park is arguably more positive in its portrayal of women than the recent Jurassic World. Why this regression?

It is easy to list some of the representations of female scientists, as if the exception proves the rule, but until such representations are entirely normalized, not enough work is being done.

Siobhan Denton is a teacher and writer living in Wales, UK. She holds a BA in English and an MA in Film and Television Studies. She is especially interested in depictions of female desire and transitions from youth to adulthood. She tweets at @siobhan_denton and writes at The Blue and the Dim.

The Manipulative Woman in Sci-Fi: Bending Time and People to Her Will

Individually, each film presents interesting, tough, somewhat complex female characters – which could be considered feminist in its own right. Taken together, however, I can’t help but see a pervasive trend that doesn’t reflect well on women. Why do filmmakers see women as master manipulators so readily? Is it simply because they believe women to be cold and calculating? Or, conversely, are they relying on audiences not seeing how tricky these women are, banking on their innocent façades to make the ending a real surprise (i.e. the ‘Basic Instinct’ effect)?

This guest post written by Claire Holland originally appeared at Razor Apple. It is cross-posted with permission. | Major spoilers ahead for the films Blood Punch, Coherence, Time Lapse, and Triangle.

I’m a huge fan of time travel thrillers, and some excellent ones have come out in the past several years. In fact, the four films I’ll be talking about today – Triangle, Time Lapse, Blood Punch, and Coherence – are four of my all-time favorites within the genre. As a disclaimer, I have to say that I deeply enjoyed all of these films, and wholeheartedly recommend them to anyone. But we’re allowed to think critically even about the things we enjoy, right? Despite loving these films, I couldn’t help but notice while watching these films that there was a conspicuous trend uniting them all – manipulative female characters. In every one of these films, a deceitful woman acts as a catalyst for the (generally unfortunate) events of the film. To be fair, some other event out of the anyone’s control causes the rift or bend in time, but it’s always a female character that underhandedly uses that time loop/lapse/rift to her advantage.

Before we get into it, though, a quick primer on the four films (although, seeing as these are time travel movies, and therefore complicated and confusing by nature, I recommend actually watching them). Time Lapse involves three friends – Callie and Finn, who are dating, and their roommate Jasper – who find a camera in their missing neighbor’s apartment that faces the window of their apartment. They soon discover that the camera’s photos show events 24 hours into the future, and try to use this to their advantage. Triangle is about Jess, a single mother who goes on a boating trip with her friends. They hit some bad weather and are forced to board what appears to be an abandoned ship, where a masked figure begins stalking and killing them. It turns out the masked figure is another version of Jess herself, trying to put an end to a time loop they’ve all been stuck in for quite some time. Coherence is the story of Em who, while at a dinner party with friends, experiences a rift in time that opens up parallel universes – some of which seem better than the one in which Em currently lives. Finally, Blood Punch revolves around Skyler, Milton, and Russell, who are stuck repeating the same day over and over again due to a Native American curse, until blood is spilled and only one person is left alive.

First of all, don’t misunderstand me – I’m not positing that any of these films set out to make an anti-feminist statement, or any statement at all, necessarily. Individually, each film presents interesting, tough, somewhat complex female characters – which could be considered feminist in its own right. Taken together, however, I can’t help but see a pervasive trend that doesn’t reflect well on women. Why do filmmakers see women as master manipulators so readily? Is it simply because they believe women to be cold and calculating? Or, conversely, are they relying on audiences not seeing how tricky these women are, banking on their innocent façades to make the ending a real surprise (i.e. the Basic Instinct effect)?

I think it’s a combination of both. The stereotype of women as emotional manipulators goes back all the way to Shakespeare (can I get a Lady Macbeth monologue?) and further. Google “women are manipulative” and you’ll find all kinds of research claiming it’s part of female biological makeup – being the “weaker” sex, women supposedly had to find other ways to survive, chief among those tactics being the manipulation of men. And society has reinforced this for, well, forever, by disempowering women and shackling their choices to the whims of men. Before 1974, a woman would have had trouble getting a credit card without her husband’s approval, so it’s no wonder if women employed a little manipulation to get what they needed. In short, the stereotype certainly still exists, even if only subconsciously, making it an easy archetype to draw on while writing a character.

Then there’s the surprise factor. Even though Basic Instinct pretty well shattered the notion that women can’t be cutthroat decades ago, these films employ the reveal of a shrewd, often merciless woman quite well. So much of each film’s runtime is spent watching men bloodily, showily batter one another in the most basic grapples for power; we’re distracted from figuring out that a woman is the one pulling all the strings, engineering the situation to her advantage, until much later. Of course, after four movies, I’d think the jig is up by now, but who knows.

While I would guess that pragmatism is most often at the root of the manipulative female character, I still find this trend troubling for one glaring reason: there is always an aspect of punishment to the character’s treatment. More often than not, the word “bitch” follows the word “manipulative,” and these stories reinforce that by indicating that the female character is bad and she deserves her situation – more so than the male characters. It’s as if attempting to shape the outcome of the situation in a way that’s favorable to her is a mortal sin, and being left to deal with the worst consequences is her penance.

Take Callie in Time Lapse, for example. Even though every character uses the photos of the future to their advantage in selfish ways that cause harm – Finn uses them to overcome his artistic block, neglecting his girlfriend in the process; Jasper uses them to gamble, putting everyone in the crosshairs of a dangerous bookie – Callie is the one who is most punished for it, when her goal is perhaps the least selfish, or at least the most sympathetic: she uses the photos to try to reignite the passion in her relationship with Finn by making him jealous. A photo shows Callie and Jasper kissing, and because the trio believes the events shown in the photos have to occur in order to avoid a paradox and keep time going along as normal, Callie and Jasper are “forced” to kiss in front of Finn. As it turns out, Callie has been secretly changing the order of the photos she shows to Finn and Jasper, presenting old photos of past transgressions (we discover she cheated on Finn with Jasper weeks ago, and the camera caught those moments) as new.

The most superficial way of looking at the situation is that Callie is a cheater who deserves everything she gets, but it is just that – superficial. The fact that Callie cheated on Finn once or twice, months ago, also points to the fact that Finn has been neglecting Callie for quite some time before the discovery of the photo machine. When Callie first finds the photo machine, she is so frantic to hide the evidence of her indiscretions and win back Finn’s love that she immediately forms a plan to do so. It’s not a malicious plan, but a desperate one, for which she is harshly punished.

Callie ends up killing Jasper in order to save Finn’s life, but when the entire scope of her manipulation is revealed, Finn rejects Callie and she kills him as well. Callie plans to warn herself of this course of events by using the photo machine so that she can change things and Finn won’t be dead or know about her manipulation, but she is interrupted by a police officer and unable to carry out the warning. Thus, Callie is doomed to her current timeline, where the love of her life is dead by her own hand, and where she will certainly be found guilty of murdering at least two (and as many as four) people. The manipulative woman is always the final witness, forced to live out the consequences of her actions – and the actions of all those around her. It is the most serious punishment, worse than death, doled out in this case for the grave sin of wanting to be loved.

The most complicated character of these three movies may be Jess in Triangle, but her motivations are only explored briefly, making the handling of her arc difficult to parse. As the single mother of an autistic child, it is revealed at the end of the film that Jess has become abusive towards her son. Jess is forced to watch herself – or rather, another version of herself in a separate time loop – abuse her son again and again. Horrified at seeing herself this way, she murders the other version of herself and takes off with her son in the car, where her frenzied driving results in his death. This sequence ends with her restarting the loop by going on the boating trip (yet again) in an effort to get to another time where her son is still alive – which spurs on the events in which she’s forced to kill her friends, and alternate versions of herself, ad nauseam.

On the one hand, Jess abuses her child – is there any adequate punishment for that? However, the Jess we see throughout most of the film seems entirely divorced from the Jess we see abusing her son at the end of the movie, and for that reason, I have a problem buying into her character as a whole. She appears to be a kind person throughout the film, and when she sees herself yelling at her son, she looks deeply dismayed and repentant. She kills the other version of herself without hesitation in an effort to protect him. For the majority of the film, she shows herself to be a loving mother who has simply been stretched too thin (it’s also hinted at that she may have been abused by her late husband), who spends every ounce of energy she has attempting to save her child’s life. There’s a disconnect between the character we get to know for 90 minutes and the one we see hitting her child for two minutes that seems mainly in place to make the viewer believe that Jess deserves to relive this agonizing loop forever.

Then there’s Em, whose fate is foreshadowed early in on Coherence. During dinner at the beginning of the film, Em explains that she lost out on an opportunity to dance the lead in a big show because she turned down the understudy part. The dancer who was supposed to do the part got sick, and the understudy who did take the job became famous. Another female guest at the dinner remarks, “So basically she stole your entire life.” Immediately, the female characters, both onscreen and off, are depicted as jealous and conniving. That depiction is reinforced when, during a comet passing that opens up alternate realities, Em finds a better reality in which she did take the understudy part, and proceeds to murder the version of herself living in that reality so she can take over. As it turns out, there are two other versions of Em wandering that reality at the same time, and though she attempts to murder them both, she only succeeds once. At the end of the film, her boyfriend receives a phone call from the other version of her that she failed to kill, and it is implied that she is about to be outed as an imposter in her own life – a feeling she already knows too well.

Once again, the punishment seems overly moralistic and self-flagellating. While other characters reveal unflattering secrets and pummel one another out in the open to little consequence, Em is, both literally and figuratively, only hurting herself throughout the film – and yet she is penalized most harshly for it. Em has obviously spent a lot of time berating herself for losing out on big opportunities. It’s unclear whether she really feels like the life she was meant to have was taken from her by someone else, or if she faults herself alone for letting it slip through her fingers, but either way, she’s not going to let opportunity pass her by yet again. She kills the alternate version of herself in an ambitious, albeit ruthless move, and she is punished dearly for that ambitiousness.

Finally – and I’ll try to keep this one short, because boy is this post getting out of hand – we have Skyler in Blood Punch, whose biggest fault appears to be that she’s smarter than the two male characters, Russell and Milton. Stuck in a time loop where the same day is played over and over again, Skyler is the first to realize that the only way out is by killing everyone else – the last person left standing will then be freed. Since she’s not strong enough to physically overcome either of her male counterparts, she uses her wits to manipulate the two men into fighting to the death. Unfortunately, her plan doesn’t go as smoothly as it could, and even after Russell and Milton are dead, she ends up trapped in the time loop again with two new people. Skyler, like Jess, is condemned to her terrible situation, possibly forever, and the audience is left feeling like she deserves it. But does she really? Because she wanted to survive – the most basic, relatable human instinct there is – and she was smart enough to figure out how to do that?

Muddying the waters further is Milton, who is a supremely likeable character, making Skyler seem all the worse. Milton thinks he loves Skyler, and is content with the idea of existing together in the time loop forever, even if it means killing Russell himself every day for eternity. Skyler recognizes what a bad idea that is – even the best couple would likely go insane being trapped in that situation forever, and Milton and Skyler barely know each other – but Milton comes off as a sweet, selfless romantic nonetheless. He serves as a foil to Skyler, highlighting her narcissism and disingenuousness, even though his motivations only take his own feelings into account and are therefore selfish as well.

Perhaps all of these films are simply metaphors for Hell, where the characters’ worst fears and traits spur on the cycle they’re doomed to live out over and over again. It’s an effective illustration, to be sure, but why is it always the women who are seen getting the worst of it? Why are they so often blamed for the very existence of Hell? In essence, the female characters are viciously punished for not being selfless every minute of every day – for sometimes being desperate, or ambitious, or for breaking down – despite the fact that the other characters surrounding them are overwhelmingly selfish as well. Even if the case can be made that these women do deserve what they get, why is it always the women who are written as the most self-centered and conniving of all characters? It’s not flattering to men, either, who populate these films as oafish idiots, lovesick dopes, and pawns.

As I’ve said, taken individually, the depictions of women in these films don’t seem nearly as damaging. Viewed together, however, I think they represent a concerning tendency to stereotype women as deceitful and untrustworthy, while men are regarded as too decent or too dumb to defend themselves. In these films’ defense, it’s the way the world has been depicted for a long, long time. In defense of women, however, I don’t think it’s all so cut-and-dried.

See also at Bitch Flicks: ‘Coherence’ Is the Best Movie You Didn’t See Last Year

Claire Holland is a freelance writer and author of Razor Apple, a blog devoted to horror movies and horror culture with a feminist bent. Claire has a BA in English and creative writing, but she insists on writing about “trashy” genre movies nonetheless. You can follow her on twitter @ClaireCWrites.

Leigh Janiak’s ‘Honeymoon’ as Feminist Horror

The film thus brilliantly puts the everyday (marriage) on a continuum with the horrifying (possession?), connecting the problem of Bea’s troubled self-expression and containment, now that she’s married, to the later seemingly supernatural plot. … Are the seemingly supernatural elements of the plot symbolic of Bea’s struggles with intimacy and the weighty expectations of married domestic life (sex, cooking, and reproduction)? Janiak’s expert writing and directing definitely leaves open this possible subtext of the film…

This guest post written by Dawn Keetley appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Although their numbers appear to be on the rise, women directors of horror are still relatively scarce. I’m always excited, then, when I can add another film to the growing list of exceptional horror films directed by a woman, a list that includes Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987), Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary (1989), Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000), Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), Jen and Sylvia Soska’s American Mary (2012), Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014), and Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body (2009) along with her even better The Invitation (2015).

Leigh Janiak’s Honeymoon (2014), which is currently streaming on Netflix, unambiguously belongs on that list. As well as directing the film, Janiak also co-wrote it, with Phil Graziadei.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iZLPNFWLxk

The film focuses on a recently and (seemingly) happily-married couple, Bea (Rose Leslie) and Paul (Harry Treadaway), who are heading on a delayed honeymoon to the cottage in the woods where Bea grew up. Things go swimmingly until Paul discovers one night that Bea is gone. He eventually finds her (in a highly creepy moment) standing in the woods, in a state of dazed and virtual unconsciousness (think Katie in Paranormal Activity, although it’s even more unsettling since Bea and Paul are deep in the woods, not on a suburban patio). The couple writes the strange event off to sleepwalking — albeit with a hefty dose of anxious self-deception, since Bea has never walked in her sleep before.

From that night on, though, Bea’s behavior becomes increasingly strange. She’s withdrawn, silent, wanders off, and scribbles obsessively in her journal. And she starts to change: she uses words that aren’t quite right (saying she’s going to “take a sleep” rather than “take a nap”). She is apparently unable to remember things about herself, about Paul, and about their relationship. And Paul overhears her practicing ways to tell him she doesn’t want to have sex. Shortly after, events spiral into the horrific.

It’s never completely clear what happens to Bea, and Janiak brilliantly keeps that question open by evoking several possibilities, not least through covert references to other horror films. Since Bea’s strange behavior begins after she and Paul meet a man from her past, it seems at first that this could be an adultery film (Unfaithful, 2002). Or is it a possession film (The Shining, 1980, Paranormal Activity, 2007)? An alien film (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956, and the recent They Look Like People, 2015)? A zombie/infection film (The Evil Dead, 1981, Cabin Fever, 2002, or Severed, 2005)? I thought of all these possibilities at different moments, prompted by the film’s rich suggestiveness.

There are also definite hints in Honeymoon of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Stepford Wives (1975), both films about paranoia and violence within a seemingly banal domesticity. Janiak’s camera, along with the screenplay, creates a stifling claustrophobia around Bea and Paul as they head off into the woods alone together, the drive overlaid with voiceovers of stories about their first date and their wedding, all signaling an extreme insularity. Indeed, the film starts with a shot of Bea recording herself (somewhat unwillingly) on camera at their wedding, saying: “I guess I’m the first one to do this. I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to say. I’m now a wife.” These opening lines of the film link her becoming “wife” (about which Bea herself seems incredulous) to an inability to speak, as if marriage has silenced her — and certainly, whatever happens to her later in the woods (is it just her honeymoon, in the end?) disrupts her ability to speak even more violently. As Bea speaks (or tries to) at the beginning, she is visually confined by a camera, by the car, and by the stark lines of roads, overpasses, and trees. The film thus brilliantly puts the everyday (marriage) on a continuum with the horrifying (possession?), connecting the problem of Bea’s troubled self-expression and containment, now that she’s married, to the later seemingly supernatural plot.

Once they get to the cottage, cracks soon surface in Bea and Paul’s marriage — tellingly, around the issue of babies. After their first night together, Paul tells Bea that she needs to “rest her womb,” a strange comment to which Rose reacts badly, saying she isn’t sure she wants a baby. Paul’s comment, which seems to surprise both of them, and which is clearly precipitated by the fact that they are now married, tellingly anticipates all the strange things Rose will say once she is “possessed” (or whatever it is that happens to her). Janiak suggests, more than once then, that perhaps it is marriage that is an utterly alien state.

It also becomes clear that Bea and Paul have some profound differences: Bea hunts, fishes and embraces the outdoors, and Paul seems more comfortable in the cabin. His constant closeness to her in the many interior scenes seems oppressive, seems to exert a pressure on her to stay with him, indoors. Indeed, the viewer soon senses that the claustrophobia we feel about their relationship (well, I certainly did) may well be shared by Bea.

The claustrophobia that infuses the film, and the sense that Bea is not immune to its grasp, is intensified by one of the clearest intertextual references in the film: Bea starts writing her name and her husband’s name (“My name is Bea,” “My husband’s name is Paul”) over and over in her journal, and the evocation of The Shining is clear, specifically Jack Nicholson’s character slowly losing his grasp on reality when trapped in a snow-bound hotel with his wife and son and with the demands his family inevitably imposes. Bea’s repetitive writing of her husband’s name, and things about their relationship, moreover, mimics the way, early in the film, they had told stories about their relationship, pushing what might have seemed benign in the beginning into the realm of something more disturbing. Bea seems to be trying to paper over the cracks, to convince herself she’s something (“wife”) that deep down she doesn’t want to be.

This is where The Stepford Wives in particular comes in: are the seemingly supernatural elements of the plot symbolic of Bea’s struggles with intimacy and the weighty expectations of married domestic life (sex, cooking, and reproduction)? Janiak’s expert writing and directing definitely leaves open this possible subtext of the film — especially given what happens at the end.
The ending, which I won’t give away, draws on several scenes in the film in which rope figures prominently, as Bea and Paul take turns tying each other up for various reasons. The meanings of these scenes increasingly turns toward the sinister, from play toward overt entrapment. While it’s Bea who gets tied up at first, the tables are turned at the end in ways that could be expressing desires that Bea may not have allowed herself consciously to feel, and that are expressed instead through the plot of her “possession.”

The use of ropes in the film actually reminded me of the late nineteenth-century short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In this story, the narrator, who has just given birth, is forced to “rest” in bed by her physician-husband (just as Paul tells Bea to “rest her womb”), and the coerced and numbing inactivity of body and mind impels the narrator into madness (raising another possibility for what happens to Bea). At the end of the story, the narrator ties herself up with a rope and is creeping around her room, a scene so horrifying to her husband that he faints. In Gilman’s story, the rope (as well as the entrapping room itself) represents the confines of patriarchal marriage — and I would argue that uses rope very much the same way, although the film’s final instance of someone getting tied up pretty much completely inverts Gilman’s ending.

The weight of this film rests on its two actors, who are virtually alone, with the fleeting (albeit important) appearance of a man from Bea’s past and his wife. Rose Leslie and Harry Treadaway are both absolutely sensational, superbly carrying this weight. Leslie does a fantastic job of expressing a sense of disquiet (in her marriage) well before things turn toward the truly strange — and Treadaway is great at expressing the kind of unambiguous, puppy-dog adoration — the desire never to let his wife out of his sight — that undoubtedly produces Bea’s ambivalence.

While what happens to Rose and Paul may in the end be about forces beyond their control, like every good horror film, Honeymoon exploits the cracks in “normality” before the truly uncanny erupts. Janiak (whose previous credits as director include only a couple of TV episodes) both knows good horror films (referencing them throughout) and knows how to make one.

I should add that it seems Sony has tapped Janiak to direct and co-write (along with Graziadei, her partner from Honeymoon) the upcoming remake of the 1996 cult hit, The Craft. As The Hollywood Reporter points out:

“The news of a female director coming on board to direct a female-centric feature project is welcome news to Hollywood, as it breaks after the studios have come under fire from the American Civil Liberties Union for ‘systemic failure to hire women directors at all levels of the film and television industry.’ Janiak’s hiring was already weeks in the works; the filmmaker impressed execs with her take on a female empowerment tale.”

Like The Craft, I think Honeymoon, too, is a “female empowerment tale,” as well as an extremely good horror tale. Leigh Janiak is definitely a director to look out for!

This post is revised and expanded from a review that appeared on a blog Dawn Keetley co-runs, about all things horror Horror Homeroom. She also teaches gothic and horror literature, film, and TV at Lehigh University in PA and has edited a collection of essays on The Walking Dead entitled We’re All Infected (McFarland, 2014).

Individuality in Lucia Puenzo’s ‘XXY,’ ‘The Fish Child,’ and ‘The German Doctor’

This guest post written by Sara Century appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Regardless of the time period or setting, there is a constant element of moody rebellion in the films of Lucia Puenzo; a deep-rooted distrust of authority that informs them at their core. Characters often become metaphors for larger issues of political strife. Good or bad, each individual’s humanity is shown via their shared vulnerability to forces outside of their control. Her work questions not only the desire to fit in, but asks why humans feel that desire to begin with. There is a tendency in her characters to challenge the status quo by their very existence in some way or another. As of this writing, she has written and directed 3 films, 2 of which were based on earlier novels of hers. She has also written a few screenplays, notably serving as one of the screenwriters on her father Luis Puenzo’s 2004 film The Whore and the Whale. Most recently, she co-created a television series in collaboration with her brother Nicolas for Argentina’s TV Publica called Cromo.

Puenzo’s solo directorial debut was 2007’s XXY, based on a short story by Sergio Bizzio. XXY is the story of an intersex teen who is raised with female pronouns, and how their family, friends, and lovers respond to their choice to stop taking hormones. The story begins with their mother and father inviting a plastic surgeon, his wife, and their son to stay with them in order to solicit advice on Alex. The plastic surgeon has an alienating affect on Alex and their family due to his disturbing lack of empathy for others, but his son Alvaro interests Alex, and they develop a mutual attraction. The narrative follows their interactions with one another as their self-discoveries coincide.

There are a plenty of heart-wrenching scenes in XXY but, in the end, it is most defined by its unwillingness to impose identities on its characters. Rather than defaulting to the gender binary, both Alex and Alvaro are given the option not to change, to exist simply as they are. By introducing another gender fluid character late in the film, Alex is shown in the context of a larger community, and accusations of abnormality from other characters seem to fall completely by the wayside. Up to that point, Alex lives in a world where society imposes an ideology that completely alienates them, and even their well-meaning parents tend to treat it as a burden to bear. Additionally, even their parents seem to believe that adherence to the norm is inevitable. By the time we meet the family, Alex would have been hearing these conversations for their entire life, and their alternating wordlessness or aggressiveness in response to these conversations comes across as understandable. The character studies in XXY are subtle and revealing, and critical response to the film was favorable, with many reviewers praising it for the tenderness with which it treats its characters.

This tendency towards deeply felt empathy has become a directorial trademark of Puenzo’s. Her follow up to XXY was the also fascinating The Fish Child, released in 2009. The Fish Child is an adaptation of her first novel, and follows Lala, the daughter of an influential judge. Lala is in love with her family’s maid, Ailin, who is roughly the same age as her, but from a much darker and more violent world. Lala’s father has been sleeping with Ailin as well, although their relationship is significantly less consensual. He is murdered, and Ailin is immediately blamed, which lands her in prison. Lala refuses to accept this fate for them, and determines to free Ailin. The film manages to fall into several genres at once; thriller, romance, drama, modern fairy tale. The dreamily in-and-out-of-focus cinematography and non-linear storytelling would even put it in the category of art house film. Connecting this work with her other films is the stylish aesthetic choices, and in this example in particular, the camera’s shifting focus and Puenzo’s meticulously chosen locations serve as characters in and of themselves, equally as defining to the overall tone as the dystopian political climate.

The Fish Child sees the return of Ines Efron, who played the lead, Alex, in XXY. She is equally compelling as the dreamy, naive Lala. The necessarily complicated relationship between Lala and Ailin is wildly endearing, conveyed expertly by both actors via body language as much by any part of the script. The commentary on Ailin’s position in life, and the way her poverty and history of sexual abuse has hardened her and limited her choices, makes her a fascinating character, and it’s easy to see why Lala falls for her. Ailin’s inner resolve and the way she switches quickly into survival mode is highlighted and contrasted by Lala’s optimistic naiveté. The two girls are very similar, but their outlooks and responses to conflict are separated at their very roots by the realities of class privilege, and this element of the film offers a sense of stark realism to this otherwise dreamy tale.

In 2013, Puenzo told her most ambitious story yet with The German Doctor, a fictional account of the infamous Nazi Josef Mengele. For those blissfully unaware, this is the man otherwise known literally as “The Angel of Death” in Auschwitz, where he conducted his famously horrific human experiments during World War II. After the fall of the Third Reich, it is well known fact that Mengele fled to Argentina, where he was protected by local authorities, civilians, and fascists still loyal to Hitler and the false science of eugenics. Based on her 5th novel, Wakolda, the film takes place during the months Mengele spent in or around Buenos Aires after the war. A young girl named Lilith, who is considered to be too small for her age, encounters a mysterious German doctor who promises her parents that he can make her grow. This should probably set off more alarms in her parents than it actually does, but, before long, he is conducting experiments on her as well as her recently birthed twin brothers. Watching this develop onscreen is absolutely chilling for anyone familiar with his history. At one point, he is shown sketching out plans for his monstrous experiments in a notebook while having a casual conversation with a child he intends to inflict them on. Small details such as that one stayed with me a long time after the credits rolled. The German Doctor succeeds in being utterly horrifying without ever even remotely resembling a horror film, which is an individual accomplishment in and of itself.

Also interesting is the way the development of the film seems to have been curbed at times by its own subject matter. In a 2014 interview with Elle, in anticipation of the film’s release, Puenzo openly discussed some of the conflict of speaking of history that some consider to be best left buried. She was quoted as saying:

“For example, we would have a location, but when we arrived, somebody had made a call and we didn’t have that location anymore. That happened a lot. Whoever was in charge had of course read the novel and knew we were mentioning the German School and that it actually existed before the war, and were very bothered by the idea. Another example was with the hotel that we shot the film in, which is also where we lived. We thought because it was closed for the holidays it would be a great proposition to rent that hotel. But in the beginning we were met with a lot of resistance. And then we found out that this hotel has a lot of German money in its origin — was made with German money. The whole time we were making the film we were confronted with facts of history, which made it very difficult to make.”

The German Doctor is a fascinating film, particularly when viewed as the culmination of the observations first made in XXY and The Fish Child. In XXY, the outside world is pressuring a young person to change something about their own bodies in order to fit in. In The Fish Child, the poor are shockingly vulnerable to the whims of the rich. Consistent with both, Puenzo’s sympathy is with the outsider. Uniquely, The German Doctor shows how the fear of not fitting in can lead to otherwise good people doing horrible things, for instance allowing Nazi war criminals to experiment on not one but three of their children.

In the end, it is this focus on individuality that is the most striking common theme of Lucia Puenzo’s works. Each of her characters undergoes intense scrutiny from outside forces, be it Alex in XXY for their gender, Lala in The Fish Child for her infatuation with Ailin, or Lilith from The German Doctor, who is quite literally forced into a physical transformation by a Nazi. In Puenzo’s films, each of these characters are threatened with the worst of all fates, which is to be just like everyone else. In each case, conformity is presented as being insidiously tantalizing. As in life, these seemingly benign choices will have a sweeping effect what kind of person each character will ultimately become.

This fascination with personal choice shows through in interviews with Puenzo. For instance, when asked in an interview with Indiewire in 2009 how she would define success, Puenzo responded, “Success for any artist is having a personal world that can be seen or felt in whatever they do,” and concluded that, “My personal goal is to be able to keep telling whatever story I want with no speculations but my own desire.” In a world where those outside of the norm are so often left voiceless, films like hers, which prize individuality above all else, are welcome and needed.

Sara Century is a multimedia performance artist, and you can follow her work at saracentury.wordpress.com.

‘Jackie Brown’: The Journey of Self-Discovery

By not blatantly focusing on the racial disparity between Jackie and Max, it speaks volumes in regards to who the film is about. … It is silently implied that as a Black woman, she divorces her identity from the men in her life — including a man who, as a white male maintains a sense of privilege in society — and reclaims it for her own.

This guest post by Rachel Wortherley appears as part of our theme week on Interracial Relationships. Spoilers ahead.

Quentin Tarantino’s third feature film, Jackie Brown (1997), presents a shift in tone from his previous films Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994). Using Elmore Leonard’s novel, Rum Punch, Tarantino departs from a world largely shaped by men. Gone are the heightened sense of reality and cartoonish characters such as the color-coded thieves in Reservoir Dogs. Unlike his latter films, Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003), Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004), Death Proof (2007), and Inglourious Basterds (2009), his characters in Jackie Brown are not professional assassins, deadly women, or covert agents attempting to assassinate a powerful dictator. These features make Jackie Brown Tarantino’s most underrated film. Here, audiences are given characters that function in the real world.

Though Tarantino is known to use other films as a template for his original screenplays, Jackie Brown is first and foremost an adaptation. The fact that Tarantino uses Leonard’s novel as source material, gave Tarantino an opportunity to rethink the way he wrote female characters. Prior to Jackie Brown, the only significant female figures in his films are “gold-digger” Mia Wallace (Pulp Fiction), and the man-eating vampire, Satanico Pandemonium, in From Dusk Till’ Dawn: characters who lack depth and complexity. Rum Punch allowed Tarantino to write a female character who is strong, desirable, morally complex, yet vulnerable. Jackie is no “airbrushed fantasy object”— she is “real,” with real world problems, obstacles, and doubts. She simultaneously exudes a sense of sensuality and capability beyond men.

Jackie Brown, portrayed beautifully by Pam Grier, is a 44-year old Black woman with a rough past, who has been reduced to working as a stewardess for a cheap airline. It is the only job she could get after her arrest for drug possession, while serving as a mule for her pilot ex-husband at another airline. The film begins with Jackie’s physical profile on the airport moving walkway with Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street” playing over the credits. The lyrics, “I was the third brother of five. Doing whatever I had to do to survive. I’m not saying what I did was all right. Trying to break out of the ghetto was a day-to-day fight” establishes Jackie’s position within the film’s universe without the use of traditional exposition. The moment Tarantino focuses on her physical profile with the interspersed music, the audience projects an idea of Jackie as confident; a hard worker; someone who has to hustle to survive. Her stewardess uniform presents her as a responsible, professional: one who serves, but also provides comfort and assurance with a tone and manner that puts even panicky passengers at ease. Jackie’s legitimate job — stewardess, parallels the illegitimate one — smuggling money for petty arms dealer, Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson). He is the “pilot” of the operation, but in times of peril, she bears the brunt of the consequences while keeping everyone calm and collected.

Jackie’s involvement with Ordell gives her the financial security her other job does not provide. But, when she is caught by Detectives Dargus (Michael Bowen) and Nicolette (Michael Keaton), this threatens her livelihood. At this moment, we see her vulnerability, and how much of her troubles result from her relationships with dangerous, erratic men. There is an element of servitude in Jackie’s relationships with these men, but she is no mere victim of circumstance. She willingly acknowledges that her own choices got her to this place.

Hers is a story of self-actualization, of finding her identity. Early in the film, she confesses to a friendly bondsman, “I always feel like I’m starting over. Starting over would be scarier than facing Ordell.” Sacrifice for the sake of self-preservation defines Jackie’s life, to aid her ex-husband and Ordell. Now, she seeks self-renewal. Because of the maturity and vulnerability that she exhibits, audiences generally want her to prevail, and are “okay” with Jackie using the same men who use her to execute the film’s central caper: a high-stakes money exchange involving Ordell and the police, circumstances that Tarantino uses to give importance to Jackie’s actions and to elevate her to the status of a hero.

Most of the men in Jackie’s life want something from her. Jackie’s pilot ex-husband wanted her to smuggle drugs onto their plane; Ordell wants her to fix the problems her arrest has caused for his business; and the detectives wager Jackie’s freedom in exchange for her help in bringing down Ordell. The only exception is Max Cherry (Robert Forster), Jackie’s bail bondsman, who falls in love with her but asks nothing in return. We witness his feelings for her emerge in the first moment he sees her being released on bail. Unlike the confident, put-together stewardess in the opening shot of the film, her hair is wild and untamed, she is without makeup, and her signature stewardess uniform is disheveled. Tarantino decides to describe this moment through use of a long shot, with Jackie walking down a long path. As she advances toward Max, the artificial light of the jail illuminates her silhouette. When Max first sees Jackie, he is transfixed by her image. He sees her true beauty, beyond the mask and the uniform she wears for the world.

Max and Jackie’s interaction is interesting because it contrasts with the romantic male/female relationships portrayed in Tarantino’s other films, which either center on the revenge narrative (Kill Bill, Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds), or a woman in peril (Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained). In Jackie Brown, the central romantic relationship occurs between two mature adults, entering the next phase of their lives. Rather than lovers, they become confidantes, emotionally vulnerable to each other. They barely know one another, yet Jackie almost immediately feels comfortable allowing Max in her home, where her reduced circumstances are apparent. But Max respects Jackie, rather than pitying her. He wants to help her without relegating her to the role of a damsel in distress. He stands at a comfortable distance, but is present in case her plan goes awry. As he watches her successfully execute her plan, Max admires her determination and bravery.

Jackie Brown also marks the first time there is more of a presence of an interracial relationship in a Tarantino film. While Ordell has a “relationship” with surfer-stoner-girl, Melanie (Bridget Fonda), it is reduced to using the other person for personal gain — financially and sexually. Essentially, Ordell and Melanie are the anti-couple in comparison to Jackie and Max. Tarantino gives us two glimpses of interracial romance in Pulp Fiction: Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), a white woman married to a Black man, Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames), as well as, the “blink and you’ll miss it” moment in the chapter titled, “The Bonnie Situation,” where Tarantino’s character is married to Bonnie, a Black woman. In fact, Bonnie’s role is so minimal that it is non-speaking, and consists of a brief image of her walking toward the camera. These dynamics are not fully captured onscreen and there is not enough time spent amongst these couples. Although, the same can be argued for Jackie and Max.

Max purchases the Delfonics record, “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” after hearing it at Jackie’s apartment, because it reminds him of her: not just as she is now, but of her youth, as she was when she first bought the album. It is as though Max hopes to know her by listening to the song repeatedly, while simultaneously maintaining the image of her the first night of their meeting, when he first heard it. In the last scene of the film, Jackie announces her intention to travel around the world — to Spain. She invites Max to come, but he politely refuses. They share a brief kiss and Max returns to business as usual. But, when Jackie drives off, he watches her leave. His face registers one of immediate regret, or longing. Max’s choice is significant for two reasons. By staying behind, he will not risk tarnishing his image of Jackie. Secondly, he allows Jackie to have the freedom, independence, and fresh start that she desires. Jackie finally has a life for herself, and if Max went with her, he might prevent her from living it. She must cut all ties to the past.

The last scene of the film is a tight close-up of Jackie’s face as she drives off, with the familiar sound of “Across 110th Street.” While the song previously existed outside of the universe of the film, this scene depicts Jackie mouthing the lyrics:

Across 110th street
Pimps trying to catch a woman that’s weak
Across 110th street
Pushers won’t let the junkie go free
Oh, across 110th street
A woman trying catch a trick on the street, ooh baby
Across 110th street
You can find it all
In the Street

Through Jackie’s acknowledgement, the song becomes a part of the film’s universe and it represents Jackie’s continued ability to overcome “the pushers” and “the pimps” largely represented by the men, save Max, who underestimated her. Although Jackie experiences a sense of freedom, tears well in her eyes, but the scene cuts and the film ends before they fall. Audiences are left to interpret this in a multitude of ways. The tears can be construed as “happy tears” that speak to the beginning of a new chapter; the idea of loss, or as a bittersweet moment. Jackie is free (and wealthy), but she leaves a decent man behind. The sense of it being a bittersweet moment is sanctioned by the audience. While we waited for Jackie to win against Ordell, we also wanted to see her “win” in love. Their relationship may be viewed as undeveloped, when it is in fact underdeveloped. Their chemistry implies that beyond the narrative of the film, or in a fantasized sequel, Jackie and Max as a romantic unit is possible.

By not blatantly focusing on the racial disparity between Jackie and Max, it speaks volumes in regards to who the film is about. Jackie’s motivations and plans are not demonstrative; they are quiet. These characteristics only add to her mystery. It is silently implied that as a Black woman, she divorces her identity from the men in her life — including a man who, as a white male maintains a sense of privilege in society — and reclaims it for her own.

Rachel Wortherley earned a Master of Arts degree at Iona College in New Rochelle, New York. She currently teaches English at Iona College and hopes to become a full-time screenwriter.

‘The Violators’ and ‘Wildlike’: Two Films Deal with the Trauma of Child Abuse in Different Ways

[Trigger Warning: for discussion of child abuse, incest, rape, and sexual assault] To what extent are filmmakers obliged to depict scenes of rape and the sexual assault of women and girls — a pandemic-sized problem in real life — in accurate and illuminating ways?

This is a guest post written by Holly Thicknes.

Trigger warning for discussion of child abuse, incest, rape, and sexual assault.

Wildlike and The Violators: two independent films released on festival circuits to rip-roaring acclaim. Both are debut features from Frank Hall Green and Helen Walsh respectively, and both deal with the uncomfortable subject of the sexual abuse of teenage girls. Yet the two films left me with very different impressions.

To what extent are filmmakers obliged to depict scenes of rape and the sexual assault of women and girls — a pandemic-sized problem in real life — in accurate and illuminating ways? If ever we are to believe that films can influence society for the better, surely we must look for critical self-awareness along with satisfying storytelling (where abuse is more than just a tool of the narrative that progresses the story). The guise of the art house genre has a history of being perceived as absolving films of the representational issues of rape as spectacle, as if the festival-to-independent-cinema distribution package amounts to an automatic stamp of approval (perhaps anyone seeing Gaspar Noé’s Love will take a moment to cast their minds back to the bitter experience that was his Irreversible, shown at Cannes in 2002). But explicitness — or as some might view it, uncut realism — in representing the sexual exploitation of women in itself is problematic if it serves no purpose other than the pleasure of spectacle. And so it is a delicate balance which filmmakers must strive to strike: an honest representation, made — crucially — for the right reasons.

Green’s Wildlike premiered at the Hamptons Film Festival in October 2014 and was the winner of over 40 Best Film awards at various other festivals. The film promises a scenic hike across Alaska, an unlikely friendship of substitution between a teenage girl and an older man and a tense chase by an abusive, ominously unnamed uncle. It delivers all three with invigorating authenticity: the photography and performances meld together to perfectly tow the line between documentary-inspired art house flick and melodramatic Alaskan road movie. The script and Green’s direction soar in moments of transition, where all the action is embedded in the faces of the characters (articulated with faultless performances all around, namely by Bruce Greenwood as male lead Rene) or else the gruff, ever-changing landscapes, and the contemplative essence of the story feels overwhelmingly all-encompassing. There is an endearing sweetness in the father-daughter friendship being cultivated with very little words but plenty of weighted glances. All the substance is there, evidently so, affording it its success and status as a breakthrough debut.

But for all of Wildlike‘s strengths, what I simultaneously can’t forgive it for nor realistically expect of it is the fact that the guesses feel clumsy around the depiction of the central female character’s abuse. They feel second hand, peripheral, flat.

In blatant contrast, The Violators is uncompromisingly captured from 15-year-old female protagonist Shelly’s perspective, and centered around the effects of the sexual exploitation she suffers. It is a film lovingly cultivated by acclaimed novelist and writer/director Walsh, who turned her hand to filmmaking for the first time with the kind of surety that relevant experience for the subject at hand affords you. She reached back into her childhood, where she grew up on the periphery of Cheshire, England, on the same streets and dockland walks we see depicted in the film, and drew out a story about a community of people suffering from the cyclical nature of abuse that forever seems to renew until someone or something finds the strength to break the cycle.

Through the eyes of Shelly, played by acting revelation Lauren McQueen, we see the people of this community play a daily game of chance with the hand they have been dealt. Exploring, as the story does, violation, no one person is made to claim all the blame and no one is absolved entirely, epitomized in Shelly’s complex character role of both sensible mother figure and misled, reckless child. Walsh hints at the details of an abusive father, in jail but possibly being paroled soon, to her and her self-sufficient siblings, and the prospect of it hangs like a spectre over everything so that current moments of violence feel grounded in her damaged past. True as the film is to real life, abuse does not change the centre of gravity of anyone else’s world, but instead informs the path that particular victim takes for the worse.

This perspective is where Wildlike falls down on the representational front, making it into a paternal film about a father-and-daughter-type friendship ever blooming in the beautiful Alaskan wilderness that sidelines the protagonist’s abusive experiences. To be fair, there is nothing insensitive about Green’s portrayal of MacKenzie (Ella Purnell), whose angsty teenager status is drawn onto her face with the filmic trope that is black eyeliner, but beyond this rightfully possesses no superficial traits that simply pigeonhole her character. The scenes of abuse are deliberately not treated as spectacle, but with impressive restraint and disgust-inducing visceral sound effects that imply rather than show (a storytelling technique that Green applies with great success throughout). But the effects of the incidents are observed from the outside, in manner of a concerned father who might look on at his daughter going through her troubled teenage years with genuine concern but bafflement. We are never invited into MacKenzie’s personal space to understand her motivations, and are instead left to second guess how messed up she must be from her experiences. Consequently, when she does break her sullen silence in a burst of emotion, the dialogue feels clumsily roped together in a bid to sound spontaneous but which comes off as whiny.

Unsurprisingly it is much easier to sympathise and identify with Rene, the recently widowed middle-aged male hiker that MacKenzie latches onto, firstly at the whiff of a meal ticket but then being tentatively drawn towards a kind and understanding father figure. Bruce Greenwood is a dream in the role, who we are introduced to in a moment when his defenses are down, in the rue of privacy whilst lying in bed, reminiscing about his late wife, without knowing that MacKenzie is actually hiding under his bed having snuck into his hotel room to nap for the night during her journey to Seattle. His male vulnerability in the wake of the manipulative uncle figure from whom MacKenzie is running is an instant catch: he is afforded an intimate look that we never get to see of her. A few silhouetted crying scenes do not cut it by any stretch.

Green has never claimed, as far as I know, to have made a film directly commenting on the lasting effects of sexual abuse on an underage girl in the hope of enlightening his audience. The meeting point of the two films is their examination of the resilience of vulnerable people in the face of attack. Wildlike does this beautifully — arguably more successfully than The Violators. But having seen both films at film festivals this year with directorial introductions, the contrast between representational intention is blatantly stark. Should films ever sideline child molestation? Should the primary victim’s account ever feel viewed from a distance? And should the issue even ever be used in a film by a male writer/director, one with undeniable storytelling skill, which gets the film into a bunch of festivals with its indie look, but uses the sensitive issue to invoke drama? It’s for everyone to individually make up their minds, but for my part I’m left with the uncomfortable feeling of having watched a film about teenage molestation and incest told superficially from the perspective of the female victim but in reality from the perspective of a man.

Holly Thicknes is a freelance film critic and editor of female-focused film blog Girls On Film. She lives and works in London, studies printmaking, and helps organise themed short film events for Shorts On Tap. She is particularly interested in the ways in which films help people carve out spaces for themselves in an increasingly lonely society. You can follow Girls On Film on Twitter at @girlsonfilmLDN.