For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli celebrate Angela Lansbury’s career by looking back to her big-screen debut in the psychological thriller Gaslight (1944).
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Here Before is a psychological thriller about a depressed woman who becomes awkwardly fixated on a nearby mother/daughter duo, triggering a flood of fragmented, fraught emotions surrounding her own relationships with her children. Like The Lost Daughter, it premiered to positive reviews in 2021, praised for the performances of its central cast and as a promising debut for its director. Since Maggie Gyllenhaal obviously enjoys more name-recognition cachet in the industry, Stacey Gregg’s own unraveling-mom psych thriller followed a much slower, quieter distribution path, newly available on the library-subscription streamer Hoopla instead of receiving an immediate awards push from the global behemoth Netflix. As a result, their thematic overlap plays to The Lost Daughter‘s favor, which got there first & louder, but the eerie feeling of having been . . . here before does mirror the latter film’s premise in an interesting way.
In this particular mom-on-the-verge thriller, Andrea Riseborough plays an Irish suburbanite who’s grieving the loss of her young daughter when a new couple moves in next door with a child that looks & acts remarkably like her. The neighbor child even shares memories & daily habits with Riseborough’s child, as if she were possessed by the daughter’s ghost. Obviously, Riseborough cannot ignore this phenomenon, which has effectively brought her daughter back to life after a year of heartbreak, and she gradually wedges herself into this young stranger’s life in a way that makes everyone around her deeply uncomfortable. The story twists & disorients from there, teetering between supernatural horror & communal-gaslighting conspiracy depending on its scene-to-scene whims. Like with The Lost Daughter, the movie’s strengths lie more its performances & discomforting parental dynamics than it does in its plot, but Gregg’s film concludes with a much more satisfying genre payoff than Gyllenhaal’s.
Even putting Here Before‘s coincidental Lost Daughter parallels aside, it’s not exactly unique in its purpose or tone. There’s plenty of Atmospheric Horror About Grief out there, especially of the post-Hereditary variety. Only this one has Andrea Riseborough at center stage, though, and she carries the genre’s tension as expertly as you’d expect. Rebecca Hall got her own acting showcase in the genre with The Night House. Sandra Oh got hers in Umma. Riseborough’s been given plenty of room to show off her range in the past (especially in Possessor, Mandy, and Nancy), but it’s still incredible to see her stretch her legs here. The way she alternates between scowling at her living, knucklehead teenage son and smiling nervously at the ghost-child who’s replaced her dead daughter is nightmarishly volatile, winding tension so tight it’s incredible her face doesn’t tear in two. Gregg matches her efforts without outshining them, except for in a music video nightmare sequence that momentarily tips the slowly building dread into true brain-melt terror.
Here Before is a low-budget, 80-minute chiller that’s entire allure is for horror fans already familiar with Riseborough’s talents as a performer. I’m doing it no favors by comparing it to a Hollywood adaptation of a best-selling novel, produced by three well-established actresses who each received Oscar nominations for their efforts (including Gyllenhaal for Best Adapted Screenplay). Still, I’d say it’s a more wholly satisfying movie than The Lost Daughter, while sharing many of its themes & saving graces. It’s a shame fewer people will see it.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the 2019 Netflix psych-thriller Fractured, starring Sam Worthington as a heavily concussed dad in crisis.
00:00 Welcome
00:55 Tatie Danielle (1990) 05:45 The Frog Prince (1971) 08:55 Licorice Pizza (2021) 14:15 Nightmare Alley (2021) 16:45 Encanto (2021) 21:30 The Woman in the Window (2021) 24:15 Dave Made a Maze (2017) 26:35 Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) 29:10 Fresh (2022) 30:25 The Covenant (2006)
There are plenty of 1970s women-on-the-verge psych thrillers out there where shit-heel men drive the women under their thumb to total madness. And we’ve covered plenty of them here on this very website: A Woman Under the Influence, Puzzle of a Downfall Child, 3 Women, Images, Sisters, etc. All those Driven Mad by the Patriarchy thrillers are varying shades of great, but few are as committed to their psychosexual terror or bloody revenge as The Witch Who Came from the Sea. It’s the cheapest and least technically competent film of the bunch, struggling to convey a hallucinatory mental breakdown in its dive-bar drunken stupor. Still, it’s incredibly potent, angry stuff, fearlessly staring down sexual terrors most movies would shy away from depicting and slicing into men’s flesh to avenge them. The Witch Who Came from the Sea might not carry the same 70s auteur prestige as other examples of its genre, which tended to be helmed by names like Altman, De Palma, and Cassavetes. It’s a true Misandrist Horror classic, though, compensating for its budgetary & stylistic limitations with an overriding sense of righteous anger.
Our heroine in distress is the alcoholic barmaiden Molly, who spends her days babysitting her adoring nephews on the beach and her nights serving well liquor for meager tips. At least, that’s the part of her nights that she remembers. Between Molly’s excessive booze guzzling and the half-remembered sexual assaults she suffered under her father as a child, there are large gaps of lost time woven into her nightly routine – often involving casual sex with strange men she meets at the bar. And murder. Molly has a spiraling habit of coaxing the beefcakiest men in her vicinity (often famous, square-jawed football players & television actors) into bed, where she initiates kinky sex and then mutilates their genitals with shaving razors. It’s initially unclear whether Molly’s bisexual threeways & beachside mansion rendezvous are sinister wet dreams. However, once her nightly murder spree starts making national news, the audience gets some solid footing in establishing that her unraveling psyche has a physical bodycount. Poor Molly never gets that same real-world footing, though. She’s lost inside her own head, and it’s terrifying in there.
Molly doesn’t despise all men, at least not when she’s awake & lucid. She thinks the world of her nephews Tadd & Tripoli—names she repeats to herself as an absent-minded mantra—and the closest thing she has to a healthy relationship in her life is a semi-open romance with her bar-owner employer. She even speaks softly & fondly of the muscle brutes she murders in her drunken fugue state, championing their value as macho role models for, you guessed it, Tadd & Tripoli. She also rhapsodically praises the memory of her abusive father, though, whom she sees as a heroic sea captain who was valiantly lost at sea, not a deranged drunk who sexually abused his own children. Molly’s sweet, swooning musings about men—especially men that remind her of her father—do not jive at all with the dick-slicing violence that emerges when she lets her guard down. This isn’t so much a rape revenge film as it is a violent character study of a woman who doesn’t have the vocabulary to express—even to herself—how men have traumatized her throughout her entire life. So, that expression instead comes through as a very close shave, after ill-advised nightcaps & hookups.
The Witch Who Came from the Sea is just as tense & unnervingly bizarre as similar women-on-the-verge classics from the likes of Cassavetes & Altman; its aesthetic & production values just lean more towards tasteless genre payoffs than subtle psychedelic dilemmas. The first sign we get that Molly is unwell is when she lustfully gawks at muscle men working out on the beach; her searing stares at the absurdly veiny bulges in their Speedos quickly turns hyperviolent, and she imagines their corpses hanging from the public gym equipment. Her romantic remembrances of her piece-of-shit father conjure seafaring images of Sirens, mermaids, ancient tattoos, and once-in-a-life-time storms. Her actual memories of his sexual assaults are scored by screeching seagulls and slurred grunts. It’s all deeply strange in an unrestrained, sloppy-drunk fashion that calls into question how much tonal control director Matt Cimber was commanding behind the camera (with the help of a young, uncredited Dean Cundey as cinematographer).
No matter where you land on that question, Molly’s bottomless anger towards the manly men of the world cuts through the seaside fog like a scythe. When she threatens to “break your bones then suck the marrow,” you better listen; otherwise, you’ll soon be ejaculating spurts of blood onto her hand-embroidered bellbottoms. It’s that pointed, visceral anger that makes The Witch Who Came from the Sea stand out among similar women-on-the-verge thrillers of the 1970s, and my only disappointment is that Molly’s anger wasn’t enough to save her from the same tragic fate this archetype always suffers in the end.
Rose Plays Julie is a subtle, well-made movie built on subtle, well-played performances. A psychological thriller about a young veterinary student’s increasingly dark mission to uncover her place in the world as an unwanted adopted child (and, more to the point, about the generational trauma of sexual assault), it has all the potential in the world to swerve into a sensationalist rape revenge tale with a violently heightened sense of style. Instead, it keeps its mood low-key & pained, allowing the Greek tragedy of its doomed characters’ downward trajectory to quietly unfold at its own pace. It’s one of those thoughtful, tasteful indie chillers that I appreciate in terms of intent & craft but only help clarify my personal disinterest in subtlety & restraint. I wish I could appreciate this quiet, finely calibrated psych-thriller on its own terms, but instead its coming-of-age fury & vet school setting just made me wish I was watching the explosive coming-of-age cannibal horror Raw instead. That’s just the kind of audience I am, to my shame.
It’s okay that Rose Plays Julie works better as an exercise in craft than as a cathartic, stylistically expressive genre film. It’s explicitly about performance in a lot of respects, which shines a direct spotlight on the actors in three central roles of Daughter (Ann Skelly), Mother (Orla Brady), and Rapist (Aiden Gillen). Gillen puts in the same raspy creep performance he’s been delivering as a manner of routine since he was cast in Game of Thrones, but the drama is more centralized on the women he’s hurt anyway. The mother is an actress by trade, shown avoiding her traumatic past by getting lost in her roles on period dramas & vampire movies. The daughter—the surviving result of a rape—is an actress by choice, taking on her imagined persona of the name on her birth certificate (paired with an unconvincing wig) as an undetectable alias while pursuing revenge against the mother’s assailant, her “father”. The tension between them is a feel-bad triangle of gloom that each actor ably performs through several layers of self-protective artifice. The avenging violence that breaks that tension is just as dejectedly sad, providing little emotional catharsis for the generations of hurt at the film’s core – presumably on purpose.
To wish Rose Plays Julie was more expressive or cathartic would be wishing for a more divisive, if not outright irresponsible kind of filmmaking that it’s just not interested in indulging. This is a very serious film about a very serious subject, and I’m sure there’s a larger audience out there who’d prefer that sober approach to genre storytelling over what’s usually offered. Personally, I could only appreciate the craft of its individual performances rather than the larger purpose they served. It’s a terrible thing to admit, but if it were even 10% trashier or flashier in its delivery, I’d probably be much more enthusiastic about where it fits in the modern revenge thriller canon.
Megan Fox got to play her own version of Gerald’s Game this year, in Till Death, which recently appeared on Netflix in the U.S. Although there are certainly some issues with pacing, it’s still fairly effective, especially for a film with such a small cast and, from the end of Act I forward, only one location.
On the eve of Emma (Fox)’s eleventh wedding anniversary to her husband, Mark (Eoin Macken), she breaks things off with her lover Tom (Aml Ameen). We learn that Mark is a lawyer and Tom is a member of his firm when Emma meets Mark at his office for their anniversary dinner. While waiting for him, she can’t help but glance through an NYPD file on his desk, detailing her attack by Bobby Ray (Callan Mulvey), whose assault left her with a scarred back; we also learn that she blinded him in one eye with her keys while defending herself. Mark immediately betrays his controlling nature, noting that he expected Emma to wear “the red dress” (his favorite) and waving off her own feelings by noting that they have time before dinner to take her home to change. At the restaurant, he also orders dessert for her after she declines, and forces her to blindfold herself before they drive to their next destination; she reluctantly accepts, although she removes the fabric in exasperation just before the couple arrives at their lakehouse. That their anniversary also falls in the dead of winter may be a metaphor for the coldness of their relationship, but given how … overwritten other elements of this screenplay tend to be, I’m not sure.
Clocking in at 90 minutes, the plot doesn’t really get going until the 22 minute mark. I’ll avoid spoilers as much as possible on the off chance that you want to watch something suspenseful but not terribly scary this spooky season, but the description on Netflix itself reveals the “twist” that gets the movie going: “A woman finds herself shackled to her dead spouse as part of a revenge plot. As the rest of the plan unfolds, a desperate battle for survival begins.” Although not particularly groundbreaking, there’s still plenty of menacing anxiety to be had here, and it’s reductionist to compare this one to Gerald’s Game (even though, um, I did that) when its narrative deviates from that novel/film fairly quickly. Both Till Death and Gerald’s Game are psychological thrillers about survivors of different forms of violence that initially present as narratives centering around immobility and physical isolation as purely physical dangers but which turn into very different narratives, but the similarities end there. Game becomes a story about the struggle for survival despite psychological breakdown in the face of certain death from dehydration or starvation, as well as outside factors in the form of a wild dog and a spectral figure; Death turns into a more straightforward home invasion thriller, with the added complication that our heroine is literally unable to decouple from her dead husband and that her attacker is the man who stalked and stabbed her a decade before, now released to menace her again.
Calling Till Death “more straightforward” is neither an insult nor a compliment, nor is it good or bad that the film feels a little like it was written by Donald Kaufman from Adaptation. The film walks a fine line between throwing twists in at the right places and following the path of least resistance in others. Not every movie needs to blaze every trail, and if you don’t know what kind of movie you’re watching by the time that Megan Fox wakes up in perfect, un-smeared makeup, then hopefully you know what kind of movie you’re watching by the time that she washes her husband’s blood off of her face and then carefully considers her still perfect, still un-smeared makeup in the bathroom mirror. And it’s not that the film can’t pull the rug from under you; for instance, once Emma gets over the initial shock of her husband’s death, she immediately tries to shoot through the cuffs binding her to him, only to discover that there was only one round and the pistol is otherwise empty. Frustrated, she tosses the gun and it lands under the bed, and I immediately thought that she would soon have to deal with a wild animal later (perhaps because I was too stuck on my Gerald’s Game hypothesis) and would be unable to get to the gun in order to defend herself, after finding bullets elsewhere in the cabin. But no, her husband’s so many steps ahead of her that he’s already cleared the house of anything useful, and although Chekhov’s gun does come into play again later, it’s in a more interesting way than I could have expected.
The film’s biggest weaknesses come when it tips its hand a little too much. The scenes that exist to demonstrate and set up Mark’s controlling nature are overwrought and on-the-nose. He’s not just picking out her dresses and ordering her dessert, he’s also oddly theatrical; at any moment up to the point of his death, he’s a hair’s breadth from tipping his hand too much, too early. When stuck in an elevator with both Tom and Emma, who pretend to only know each other from a prior office Christmas party, Mark turns juuuuust too menacing for a picosecond too long as he growls “You know damn well it wasn’t the Christmas party,” before breaking the tension he artificially inflated by jovially adding “It was the holiday party!” noting that it wouldn’t do to have the political correctness police scold them. It’s not enough for Emma to notice, with a wistful gaze full of regret, that a woman at another table has accepted a proposal; the narrative has to force the two women into the bathroom at the same time so that Emma can give the younger woman a warning about becoming trapped in a loveless marriage. Hating on Megan Fox’s acting ability was pretty du jour internet comedy during the late aughts, but she’s more than fully capable of conveying what needs to be communicated in these scenes without needing to telegraph these beats so strongly. I’m not sure if the producers didn’t have enough faith in Fox, in the audience, or both, but we spend far too much time with unnecessary narrative wheel-spinning before we get to the point that I’d almost recommend skipping the dinner sequence entirely, but it’s threaded with just enough foreshadowing and plot-seeding that it has to be born on one’s shoulders for a bit of a slog.
Despite that there are sections of the narrative that can feel like a bit of a barefoot slog across the snow, I’d still say that this is a cute way to spend an evening, especially if you’ve ever had a bad breakup (which, I mean, who amongst us hasn’t?) and wondered if it could have been worse. Turns out, yeah, it could have been.
I recently corrected a major personal blindspot for an episode of The Swampflix Podcast: I finally watched Vertigo. Actually, we watched four different versions of Vertigo for that discussion, if you include its cheap-o homages Obsession, Perversion Story, and The Green Fog. While I wasn’t fully convinced by the critical consensus that Vertigo is The Greatest Film of All Time (a near-impossible standard for any movie to live up to), I found the experience of watching that same story repeated in film after film to be mildly hypnotic, to the point where I now see its influence everywhere. Thinking back to recent, unrelated movies I didn’t immediately clock as “Hitchcockian” when I first watched them—titles likePhoenix, Ismael’s Ghosts, Double Lover, and Dogs Don’t Wear Pants—all I see is Vertigo, Vertigo, Vertigo all the way down. That was also my exact experience while watching the recent Hungarian romance thriller Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time. Any of the long-simmering intrigue & dread the movie establishes with its high-concept premise can’t help but feel like a distant, hollow echo of Vertigo to me right now, while I’m still stumbling through new movies in this Hitch-hypnotized state.
At least Preparations to Be Together gender-flips the usual Vertigo dynamic, detailing the romantic & erotic obsession of a woman trailing her dream version of a man who may not exist, as opposed to the Pygmalion tropes of the story we’re used to. A Hungarian neurosurgeon returns to her home city of Budapest after decades of practicing medicine in New Jersey, stalling her prestigious career on the cutting edge of medicine technologies to chase down a man she had a brief romantic connection with at a medical conference. When she reunites with him in his hospital’s parking lot, he does not recognize her, claiming they have never met. And so, we have the ironic story of a neurosurgeon losing her mind as she obsesses over a man she’s intensely attracted to but who also may be a total stranger, a ghost, or a figment of her imagination. She’s more of a quiet observer than she is an active, charismatic protagonist – conveying most of her internal conflict through the cold intensity of actor Natasa Stork’s metallic blue eyes. Still, director Lili Horvát manages to maintain a constant tension between heartbreaking loneliness & otherworldly mystery throughout, even if her reluctance to do anything flashy or concrete with that stored-up energy can be a little frustrating once the end credits hit.
Preparations to Be Together feels like Vertigo reimagined (or maybe unimagined) as the kind of middling Euro psych-thrillers I routinely, dutifully watched as a teen, when late-night IFC broadcasts were my only access to High Brow Cinema. Its unflinching indulgences in sexual intimacy, surgical gore, and philosophical discussions of the human brain are the exact kind of thing that would’ve made me feel smarter than I really was as a mouthbreathing teenager, but I can’t say they resonate with any real heft now. It ultimately wasn’t my recent over-exposure to the apparently wide-ranging genre of Vertigo Homage that numbed me to the movie’s low-key, ethereal charms. It was more that after decades of watching so many wishy-washy Euro headscratchers on cable broadcasts, film festival screens, and borrowed library DVDs it’s hard for any one example to stand out from the others. If anything, my recent Hitchcock Homage tangent was a life raft that gave me something solid to latch onto, since so much of the film is fluid & restrained.
There have been a few truly great entries in what I call the Writer’s Block Thriller genre in recent years, a canon once populated only by Charlie Kaufman screenplays. Titles like Staying Vertical, Sybil, and Ismael’s Ghostshaven’t exactly dominated the pop culture discourse, but they’re fantastically frustrating headtrips for the few audiences who discovered them in their film festival & Netflix algorithm burial grounds. These are films in which a creatively constipated artist stares at the blank page until they go mad, eventually getting further & further wrapped up in pointlessly absurd, go-nowhere conflicts created mostly by avoidance of completing their own work. The Writer’s Block Thriller is often a meta, heavily neurotic genre that’s mostly about their off-screen creators’ personal & professional anxieties more than they are about characters or plot. Even when done well, there’s an embarrassing layer of narcissism that weighs down the exercise, which can feel like reading a stranger’s tell-all diary. When done poorly, it can feel like reading an exceedingly boring stranger’s diary, which doesn’t at all help with the second-hand embarrassment.
Black Bear fits very snugly in the Writer’s Block Thriller genre, if not only because it plays more like an academic writing exercise than it does a complete work. Aubrey Plaza, Christopher Abbott, and Sarah Gadon co-star in this meta mental-breakdown thriller as narcissistic filmmakers & artists who are bad at their jobs and bad at their relationships. They start the film as Brooklynite hipsters staging a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? type dinner party from hell while on an artists’ retreat in the woods. Then, their character traits are scrambled & reassigned for a second, paralleled scenario in which they all continue to manipulate & berate each other in feel-bad Edward Albee tradition – this time for twice the length. These two lopsided segments are rigidly separated by chapter breaks & a repeated image that resets the stage like a rotary dial: Aubrey Plaza sitting at a writing desk, frustrated by the blank page. It plays as if writer/director Lawrence Michael Levine had access to a nice woodland cabin location & a few talented actor friends for a long weekend, but no clear idea of what he wanted to accomplish with those resources. You can practically see him sitting at his own writing desk, unable to get any work done because petty arguments with his friends & lover are looping loudly in his own neurotic skull. The result feels labored, uninspired, self-indulgent and, worst of all, pointless.
If there’s anything useful that came out of this Creative Block writing exercise, it’s in gifting the three central actors a lot of archly hyper-emotional dialogue to play around with. I’ve seen some claims that this is Aubrey Plaza’s best work to date, which can only be assumed if you haven’t been paying attention to her work in recent years; she’s been just as great in much better films (Ingrid Goes West, The Little Hours, Joshy, hell even The To Do List & Dirty Grandpa). Still, it’s true that the second, overreaching segment of the film allows her to run wild & manic in a way we only really get to see from Elizabeth Moss in recent years (an unavoidable comparison, given the central premise’s parallels with Queen of Earth), a mode that Plaza is deliciously sinister in. As frustrating as Black Bear‘s structureless meandering can be in a narrative sense, it is consistently impressive as an actors’ showcase. That feels like an intentional feature of the writing too, which loosely sketches each character as an over-the-top stage play archetype rather than a real person. In the film’s best scene, Plaza is trapped at a dinner table listening to a couple systematically contradict every one of each other’s statements in an absurdly endless flood of bickering & snipes – the one time both the writing and the performances seem in sync instead of circling each other in search of a purpose.
The most frustrating thing about Black Bear‘s shortcomings is that it’s totally aware of its own pointlessness. In the opening segment, a character openly asks a filmmaker “How you can you make something if you don’t have anything to say?” with the incredulity of someone who just sat through a screening of Black Bear. Levine even works in a parody of a Kubrickian asshole director who allows his creative hubris to drive his collaborators into the ground with endless takes & headgames in empty pursuit of some unattainable intellectual exercise that’s above everyone else’s heads. By all accounts, Kubrick was a total nightmare to work with, but at least his films all felt like they had a clear vision & sense of purpose. By contrast, this movie feels like a placeholder for an idea that never fully formed by the time production wrapped. If the best Writer’s Block Thrillers feel like reading a filmmaker’s personal diary, Black Bear feels like flipping through an abandoned, forgotten sketchbook. It’s all very lopsided, unfinished, and not quite ready for public view.
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before and we discuss it afterwards. This month Britneemade Boomer, Hanna, and Brandonwatch 3 Women (1977).
Britnee: “I’m trying to reach toward a picture that’s totally emotional, not narrative or intellectual, where an audience walks out and they can’t say anything about it except what they feel.” Robert Altman’s words about his 1977 masterpiece 3 Women accurately describes the experience I had when watching it for the first time about a year ago. When I first saw the film I didn’t really understand what I had watched, but I knew that I loved it. Over time, it’s become one of my all-time favorite movies. The idea for 3 Women came to Altman in a dream, and the movie really does feel like a dream, where nothing really makes sense yet everything feels perfectly normal. Typically, when you wake up from a dream it’s difficult to explain it to others, and 3 Women is equally difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t seen it.
As the title suggests, 3 Women is about three women: Pinky (Sissy Spacek), Millie (Shelley Duvall), and Willie (Janice Rule). Pinky is a carefree young girl and possibly a teenage runaway. She finds a job working at a geriatric health spa, which is where she meets her new coworker and her new obsession, Millie. Millie is a bit older than Pinkie. When she’s not working at the spa, she’s talking about all sorts of unappetizing recipes and how much she loves Scrabble. She actually never stops talking, but the problem is that no one listens to her. Everyone around her acts as if she doesn’t exist. Everyone except for Pinky, who is infatuated with Millie in a very Single White Female sort of way. Pinky eventually becomes Millie’s roommate in an apartment complex for singles. On their way to the apartment, Millie brings Pinky to her favorite bar, Dodge City, a dive attached to an abandoned Old West theme park in the middle of the desert. Both the bar and the apartment complex are owned by Edgar and his pregnant wife, Willie. Willie is older than Millie and Pinky, and she spends her time painting bizarre murals in silence.
Of the three women, my favorite is Millie. My God, Shelley Duvall is utter perfection in that role. She’s one of the most tragic characters in all of cinema, wasting most her time talking to people who don’t bother making eye contact with her or even acknowledge her existence. Whether it’s the group of male physicians she awkwardly lunches with, her coworkers, or the tenants in her apartment complex (especially bachelor Tom, with his never-ending “cough”), everyone treats Millie like a ghost. She really embodies that feeling of when you are trying to talk to someone in a dream, but they won’t respond or pay any attention to you.
Brandon, what did you think about Millie? Did her character’s journey throughout the film stick out to you more than Pinky and Willie?
Brandon: The main reason that Millie is such a standout in that central trio is that Shelley Duvall is such a heartbreaker of a performer. She is too fragile for this callous world, and watching people crush her spirit is always absolutely devastating. Whether in canonized classics like The Shining or in disposable novelties like Altman’s own Popeye adaptation, she is perfectly suited for the damsel in distress archetype. Unfortunately, this extends beyond her fictional performances and bleeds over into her real-life persona, something that’s haunted me ever since her offscreen struggles with mental illness were crassly exploited for ratings on a very special episode of Dr. Phil in 2016. Watching Millie endlessly chat at no one in particular, reaching out for human connection to a disinterested world only to be rejected, ignored, or taken advantage of over and over again easily made for the most compelling performance of the three women for me. By which I mean I spent most of the movie wanting to reach through the screen to whisk her away to a community that actually gives a shit about her. Even seeing her skirt get caught in the car door every time she went for a drive was just as heartbreaking as it was adorable.
The tragedy, of course, is that she does not acknowledge the one person who’s actively listening to her babble about boardgames and casserole recipes. Pinky’s childlike crush on Millie is just as delicately menacing as Spacek’s telekinetic fury was in her performance as Carrie White, but there is a kind of sweetness to her obsession as well. Pinky goes way overboard in her fixation on Millie, extending beyond a “I want to be your best friend” sentiment to more of a “I want to wear your skin like a housecoat” vibe. Still, Pinky’s loving attention towards her new roommate & unwilling mentor is essentially just an intense overdose of the kindness & interconnectedness that Millie longs for. It’s heartbreaking that they can’t get past their awkward social barriers to truly connect with one another on a meaningful level (ditto in their relationship with the reclusive artist Willie, who’s just as closed off to the world as Millie is openly vulnerable to it), so it’s effectively a relief when real-world logic breaks down to allow them to form a truly cohesive unit. The film strikes a nightmarish tone as it shifts their world around to allow these connections to happen, but the end result is outright sublime, serene: they become a family.
I don’t know why there are so many psychological thrillers where women who are fixated on each other start to meld & swap personalities over time, but I do know that I’m always a sucker for it (with recent examples including titles like Queen of Earth, Sibyl, Always Shine, and Butter on the Latch). Even so, 3 Women registers as one of the greats, maybe bested only by the queen of the genre: Persona. Boomer, do you have any thoughts on this genre in general or how 3 Women functions within it? What differentiates its tone & purpose from a more typical woman-on-the-verge-of-a-breakdown story?
Boomer: When the Swampflix Canon was updated a few months ago, I took a look at my contributions to that list and had one of those “You really don’t see your patterns until they’re laid out in front of you” moments and realized that there are apparently only three things that I like: (in Brandon’s words) “populist superhero spectacles, obscure Euro horrors,” and women-on-the-verge films. My love for the aforementioned Queen of Earth is well documented, but the film that I thought of most frequently throughout 3 Women (after my initial thoughts of “Oh, this is Single White Female” followed by “Oh this is actually Mulholland Drive“) was Puzzle of a Downfall Child, which similarly features dreamlike narrative and “gauzy” filmmaking juxtaposed against harsh realities of disaffection and occasional violence.
There’s a definite undercurrent of that quality that fascinates me in that genre present in 3 Women, but one major difference that I see is that 3 Women has (arguably more than) one woman who’s already on the other side of the verge: Willie. She’s clearly past the point where she cares about “society” in any meaningful way, living in a derelict mini golf park/shithole bar and spending her waking moments making angry and occasionally violent (literally, with bullet holes on the canvas) art on every available surface. Millie isn’t really flirting with the edge, yet, but you can tell that she knows it’s not too far away, as her constant attempts to garner not just the friendship but the mere attention of her peers and other members of the community is her defining character trait; at first, Pinky isn’t even aware that there’s a cliff that she could possibly go flying over, until her disappointment in and (tacit and explicit) rejection by Millie causes her to leapfrog straight over her crush/roommate into complete loss of identity.
What really differentiates 3 Women from others in this genre, however, is the way that it treats the characters’ pasts. Queen of Earth has flashbacks to the year prior and features much discussion of the past and the characters’ relationships that delineate their current conflict; Puzzle of a Downfall Child likewise has flashbacks to Lou’s childhood that ultimately explain why she is the way she is, albeit not without some contradiction; 2011’s The Roommate (which I’m citing because I saw it more recently than Single White Female, despite it being a worse movie in every way) has a backstory and a diagnosis for our identity-coveting villain. Like the desert itself, the “now” of the film seems ageless in an anxious, foreboding, and eternal way. We learn relatively nothing about Willie, even in comparison to her husband, whom we at least know is a prankster and a former stunt double from the outset. We know a little bit more about Pinky, but her backstory is still mysterious and possibly false, as we never really confirm if she’s even from Texas. In comparison, we know lots more about Millie because she’s always talking about herself, but the things we learn about her are pretty shallow (that irises are her favorite flower, that she had to sleep in the rollaway bed in the living room a lot when her previous roommate had “company,” and that she keeps a daily journal that’s factual and perfunctory rather than insightful or meditative) and don’t really inform an understanding of her long term psychology, other than the fact that she’s doing her level best to be “normal” without much success. There’s a strength of character and identity that’s conveyed solely through performance here without the standard packaging of “Character X does Y because of childhood event Z” that we normally see, and I like that a lot.
Hanna, what do you think of Pinky’s story, in or out of the context of the epilogue? I’m thinking in particular of her pre-hospitalization stories (such as they are) about herself, and the scene where Millie drives her home to the apartment for the first time, wherein Pinky compares their surroundings to Texas; later, when Pinky’s parents (maybe) visit to see her, her mother (maybe) says “It sure doesn’t look like Texas.” Does she really not recognize her parents only due to amnesia and taking on an amalgamation of Millie’s real and imagined identities, or is it because they’re not her parents, as is potentially indicated by Mrs. Rose’s claim that Mr. Rose came up with the name “Pinky,” although we know her real name is Mildred (or is it)? Is Pinky merely an honest girl who experienced severe brain damage or does she simply lie about her past like a lot of teenagers do and lose track of her deceptions?
Hanna: To be honest, I had a very hard time interpreting the journeys of these characters, or at least articulating any kind of interpretation. Just like in a dream, the relationships are foggy, disjointed, and archetypal; it seems like you can’t make sense of them unless you close your eyes. So, when I close my eyes, I feel like Mr. and Mrs. Rose are the parents of pre-coma Pinky, who dies in the pool; when Pinky is “reborn” as Mildred, her parents aren’t her parents anymore. I don’t think Pinky is lying about her past, and I don’t even really think that “Mildred” Pinky is brain damaged; I see “Pinky” Pinky and “Mildred” Pinky as two connected but distinct people, one of whom has started to absorb Millie’s identity. Pinky’s dive felt sacrificial, and the first step towards fulfilling the prophecy of enmeshed identity that Willie’s paintings seem to predict; through the sacrifice, she destroys any part of her that has history outside of the other two women. I also think it’s telling that, in the very end, Pinky identifies Millie as her mother, and that all three women have established relationships that preclude individual lives. This is a totally strange line of logic in real life, but if it was happening in a dream I don’t think I would question it.
I think one of the most compelling aspects of this film was each woman’s sublimation of self into a single folkloric identity. Boomer’s pointed out that nagging “eternal” feeling of the desert, and that perfectly describes my feelings about the three women. The film starts off with Pinky and Millie working in the rehabilitation center for the elderly, but slowly the two women are drawn out of Californian society and into this dreamworld saloon by the magnetism of Willie, the pregnant Wild Woman. In the end, we find all three of the women abandoning the identities that no longer serve them, creating a dreadful symbiotic family comprised of a Child, a Mother, and an Elder out on the ranch that’s incapable of fostering growth outside of itself. I imagine that they’ll be living out there until the end of time, certainly never in need of a spa for the old.
Lagniappe
Brandon: This feels like a huge departure from what I’ve come to expect from a Robert Alman picture. I’m much more used to seeing him in his big cast/overlapping dialogue mode (Short Cuts, Nashville, Pret-a-Porter, Gosford Park, etc), and 3 Women feels like a much more insular, cerebral experience than that. I wish he had tackled this kind of eerie, dreamlike, horror-adjacent material more often; he’s damn good at it. Looking through his filmography, the hallucinatory psych-horror Images is really the only title that seems close to this territory, and I’m excited to check it out.
Hanna: I definitely agree that Shelley Duvall was the standout (I cringed very deeply and personally during the lunchroom scenes), but I really wish this movie had more Willie. Her energy elevated 3 Women from a dreamy psycho-drama into the realm of the mystical. On the other hand, I think that mysticism was accentuated by the fact that she spent 90% of her scenes skulking around the edges of the frame painting beautiful, tortured fish-people.
Britnee: Listening to Millie talk about now vintage recipes made with nothing but processed ingredients brought me so much joy. The one that stuck out to me the most was Penthouse Chicken. When she was trying to impress the table of silent doctors with the recipe that can be “made with a can of tomato soup,” I was sold. It turns out I’m not the only one who wanted to make Penthouse Chicken after watching 3 Women. The Famous for My Dinner Parties blog (titled after a direct quote from Millie) posted a picture of the recipe from the 1963 cookbook Cooking with Soup. What a great dinner and movie combination!
Boomer: Shelley Duvall’s overall career is referenced above, and I think it’s worth mentioning that when I think of her name, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t The Shining or Popeye, it’s Faerie Tale Theatre. Enjoy.
And also this, which is one of my earliest memories of watching a movie and fully warped my brain.
Upcoming Movies of the Month September: Hanna presents Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) October: Brandon presents Monster Brawl (2011) November: Boomer presents Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (2003)
I’m becoming increasingly tickled by the Charlie Kaufman-esque story template in which Writer’s Block leads an increasingly unraveled protagonist down an absurd rabbit hole at their own peril. Between Ismael’s Ghosts, Staying Vertical, and now Sybil, France has gradually emerged as the #1 exporter of these bizarro psychological thrillers about frustrated writers, which rarely earn great critical accolades despite constructing some of the most unpredictable, confounding plots in cinema. Overall, Sibyl doesn’t revolutionize the structure or purpose of the Writer’s Block thriller in any significant way, but it does reshape the (admittedly loose) genre’s usual tone by casting a woman in the central writer’s role. Typically, these post-Kaufman psych-thrillers profile Macho Academic types in a moment of Mid-Life Crisis, so it’s a relief to see the genre shaken up with a woman’s internal fixations & sexual urges for a change. Otherwise, Sibyl behaves just as you’d expect given the Writer’s Block-driven downward spiral its protagonist suffers. It’s just an acquired taste I’ve personally acquired with glee.
The titular Sibyl is a frustrated psychiatrist who’s decided to pull back from the professional demands of her clientele to re-focus on writing novels – only to be confronted by the dreaded Blank Page. She’s then pulled back into her psychiatry practice by a new patient in crisis, an actress whose affair with a famous co-star is causing an on-set meltdown (as the man is also sleeping with the film’s director). Sibyl verbally protests that she cannot become involved in this young, chaotic woman’s life, but she’s clearly addicted to the drama that unfolds. Her avoidance of writing a new novel fades as she chooses to write about this soon-to-be-famous (or soon-to-implode) actress under a pseudonym, becoming more & more involved in the young woman’s life under the guise of “research.” It’s clearly addictive behavior that’s linked directly to her addiction to work, her addiction to past sexual partners, and—most explicitly—her alcoholism. At the start of their relationship, the psychiatrist is protesting that she cannot become involved in the actress’s personal drama. By the end, she’s practically directing the movie herself as her life falls apart outside the boundaries of her newest, singular obsession.
As with the best of these Writer’s Block psych-thrillers, Sibyl is excitingly playful in its style & narrative structure. It begins with a chilling piano score & 70s grindhouse typeface, as if it were a remake of Halloweeninstead of an intellectual drama. It also later teases swerves into De Palma-era erotic thriller territory, but those genre throwback touches are more stylistic flavor than they are narrative substance. The narrative itself is more guided by tabloidish obsession with “celebrity” criminals like Robert Durst & Casey Anthony than anything recalling De Palma or Carpenter, to the point where Sibyl’s only connection to those genre traditions is in her shameless voyeurism (most amusingly depicted in her late-night laptop binges on junky clickbait headlines). The movie itself is tickled with the farcical adultery configurations of its central cast, but it’s most concerned with creating a fractured portrait of its doomed alcoholic writer as she spirals out. The sordid details of her involvement in her patient’s life is less important than the addictive, self-destructive impulses that lead her there – freeing the movie to have a laugh at her exponentially absurd downfall even when it’s at its most excruciatingly grim.
The only major fault with Sibyl is that you could name several movies that push its basic elements way further into way wilder directions. Beyond its obvious Kaufman ancestry,Double Lover& Personaboth come to mind. Otherwise, it’s an admirably solid Movie For Adults, the kind of thoughtfully constructed erotic menace that used to be produced by Hollywood studios at regular intervals but now only seeps quietly through European film festivals. The movie works best when it’s clearly having fun with the absurdity of its unraveling premise, like when it frames Sibyl pensively vaping out a window in a Writerly way or in its casting of Toni Erdmann star Sandra Hüller as scene-stealing comic relief. It also takes the sexual urges & self-destructive behavioral patterns of its protagonist seriously enough that its central conflict never implodes into comic oblivion either. We’re fully invested in the manic downfall of this frustrated writer, even if not quite as much as she’s involved in her patient’s.
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