sexual assault

Sorry, Baby (2025)

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The Sundance Film Festival is soon to move locations to Boulder, Colorado within the next couple years, after decades of staying put in the smaller town of Park City, Utah. The move has been announced as a major shakeup for the festival, but from where I’m sitting halfway across the country, it’s at best the second biggest move the fest has made this decade. The biggest culture shift for Sundance in the 2020s has been moving a significant portion of its program online, launching a Virtual Cinema component in 2021 to compensate for the social distancing restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic. The shift from a purely in-person festival to a semi-virtual one has had some hiccups, especially since it’s invited opportunistic piracy among fanatics who’ve leaked steamier scenes of their favorite actors out of context to social media for momentary clout, jeopardizing this new resource. It has also opened the festival up to a wider range of audiences & critics who can’t afford (either fiscally or physically) to attend in-person, calling into question the value of film-festival exclusivity. I have not yet personally “attended” Virtual Sundance in any direct way, but the experience does sound like a more condensed version of how I interact with the festival anyway. Staged in January, months before the previous year’s awards cycle concludes at The Oscars, Sundance is always the first major event on the annual cinematic calendar. Intentionally or not, I spend my entire year catching up with the buzzier titles that premiere there, as they trickle down the distribution tributaries until they find their way to Louisiana. Let’s take this year for example. Swampflix has already covered ten feature films that premiered at Sundance this January — some great, some so-so: Twinless, Lurker, Dead Lover, Predators, The Ugly Stepsister, Zodiac Killer Project, Move Ya Body, Mad Bills to Pay, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and The Legend of Ochi. This was not an intentional project, just something that happened naturally by keeping up with the more significant releases of the year. And we’re still anticipating a few 2025 Sundance titles that won’t hit wide distribution until after Sundance 2026 has concluded: Obex, By Design, and Endless Cookie, to name a few. In that way, most film-nerd audiences who aren’t firmly established in The Industry are constantly attending some form of Virtual Sundance just by going to the movies week to week, so it’s been exciting to see the festival condense that slow rollout process a little bit by offering some more immediate access to their program online during the festival proper.

My unintentional Virtual Sundance experience has continued into the 11th month of the year with the recent addition of the festival standout Sorry, Baby to the streaming platform HBO Max. The positive critical reception of the film at the festival (along with a jury prize for screenwriting) positioned Sorry, Baby as one of the first Great, Must-See movies of the year, months before it would be available for wide-audience exhibition. I mention all of this not to claim the film has become overhyped or outdated in the months since, but to register my surprise at how Sundance-typical it is in practice. There are a lot of ways that Sorry, Baby‘s tone & tenor are specific to the creative voice of its writer-director-lead Eva Victor, but its storytelling structure is also unmistakably Sundancy. Here we have a story about a smart twentysomething academic navigating their way through a personally traumatic event with the help of quirky side characters played by widely respected indie-scene actors (most notably in this case, Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges, and John Carroll Lynch). The themes are heavy but the overall mood is defiantly light, with constant self-deprecating character humor undercutting the soul-crushing facts of modern life. Also, there’s a kitten hanging around, providing the homely comfort of the obligatory cat that lounges in every decent used bookstore. With the exception of a couple showy framing choices that consciously distance us from the protagonist’s trauma (one in physical distance, one in chronology), the filmmaking side of Sorry, Baby is secondary to the writing and the performances, which are as smartly crafted as they are grounded to reality. Victor shines brightest as a writer and a screen presence rather than as a director, with the darkness & fearlessness of the dialogue often cutting through the more restrictive, routine form of the images. They land some tricky laughs and the real-life hurt of the drama weighs heavy on the heart, but there’s not much to the film that can linger past the end credits beyond recognition that it was written by a smart person. In fact, Victor seems intent to constantly establish their mouthpiece character as the smartest person in every room, often as a way to vent about the institutional failures that compound personal trauma. Legal, medical, and academic bureaucrats play strawman to the mightier-than-the-sword screenwriter’s pen, while only the protagonist’s inner circle of supportive friends are afforded any humanistic grace notes. It’s a writer’s project first & foremost, to the point where it’s literally about the writing of a master’s thesis.

I suppose I should be more specific here and note that this is a film about the personal & professional fallout following a sexual assault. Victor plays a master’s student who is assaulted in her advising professor’s home, derailing any personal or professional development past the most traumatic event of her life. This assault is revealed to the audience indirectly. It is obscured from view behind the closed door of the professor’s home, which is framed in an extreme wide shot of rapid time elapse, chilling the audience instead of inviting us into the violence of the act. We are also kept at a distance from this violent act by the screenplay’s scrambling of the dramatic timeline, with chapter titles like “The Year with the Baby,” “The Year with the Bad Thing,” “The Year with the Questions,” and “The Year with the Good Sandwich” confusing the chronology of her trauma & recovery. At first, all we know is that she’s been stuck in time since “The Bad Thing” happened, living in the same grad-school house and working in the same dusty university offices for an eternal limbo as she puzzles her way through how to move past that moment without allowing her entire life to be defined by it. Quietly hostile interactions with doctors, lawyers, colleagues, and clueless neighbors offer Victor an opportunity to vent about how ill-equipped institutions are to address personal trauma with any empathy or humanity. The most striking thing about the movie is when Victor cuts through those broader observations about the culture of rape to rattle the audience with more personal observations. After the assault is obscured from an extreme wide-shot distance, Victor is then shown recounting minor details from the event to a roommate in intimate close-up, crouched in her bathtub. That intimacy is later echoed in a second bathtub scene in which she attempts to physically connect with her sex-buddy neighbor, who spoils the moment in much subtler, underplayed ways than the doctors & lawyers who press her for invasive details about the worst moment of her life. Whether broad or intimate, it’s all smartly observed and it’s all couched within a deadpan-humorist writing style that lessens the miserabilist potential of the topic. The question is whether having something smart to say fully justifies making a movie—as opposed to writing an essay or a stage play—beyond the form’s ability to get Victor’s words in front of as many people as possible. Sorry, Baby‘s chosen form is a useful delivery system for Victor’s writing, but I don’t know that it ever fully registers as cinematic beyond its recognizability as routine Sundance fare, to be slowly doled to the masses throughout the year.

-Brandon Ledet

After the Hunt (2025)

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Back when I saw Anatomy of a Fall in theaters a couple of years ago, I was struck by the strangeness of the prestige picture having an advertised URL that encouraged audience members to vote on whether the main character was guilty of killing her husband or not. At the time, about two-thirds of viewers believed in her innocence, which has increased slightly to 70% innocent/30% guilty in the two years since release. That film, as well as Tár, was at the forefront of my mind for most of the runtime of After the Hunt, the newest film from director Luca Guadagnino (and a freshman writing effort from Nora Garrett, heretofore a mostly unknown actress). I’m surprised to see that this one has been faring so poorly critically at this juncture (as of this writing, the Google review aggregator is showing a 2.1 rating out of 5 — admittedly only out of 110 reviews. More damningly, both the critical and audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are hovering in the range between 35 and 40%), and I can’t help but think that some large portion of this critical laceration comes from the fact that the modern audience has lost the ability to appreciate ambiguity, let alone accept it or see its value in the context of a piece of art. That, or some are simply too turned off by its approach to its sexpolitik.

After the Hunt is a character study of Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), a professor of ethics and philosophy at Yale, detailing the relationships she has with three primary players in her life. There’s her queer grad student and PhD candidate Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), a young Black woman who nonetheless comes from a wealthy, privileged background; alongside Alma in the department is fellow professor Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), a flirtatious libertine who’s poorly hiding his attraction to Alma; and finally, Alma’s husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a psychiatrist with a tendency toward dramatic flair and culinary spectacle, who is the only one aware that she’s suffering in silence over a painful physical ailment. After a party at the Imhoffs’ one night, Alma watches as Hank and Maggie depart together so that he can walk her home. The following day, she arrives to campus to find Maggie absent and unresponsive. After a quick drink with Hank during which he demonstrates himself to clearly be horny for her, she returns home to find Maggie on her doorstep, where she tells Alma that Hank sexually assaulted her the previous evening. By the next morning, Hank has already set up a lunch with her at a local Indian restaurant where he explains his side to Alma: that he had caught Maggie plagiarizing some of her work a couple of weeks prior and found her doing it again in her PhD dissertation, and that he had wanted to give her the chance to explain herself and offer her the opportunity to come clean before he was forced to rat her out to Alma. In all of this, Frederik tries to support Alma as best as he can, but she keeps him both at arm’s length and uninformed (he learns about the allegations against Hank in the newspaper), possibly because she unconsciously recognizes that he sees all the sides more clearly than she can. 

The performances here are stunning. Edebiri in particular stands out, as the overall complex ambiguity of her performance is an absolute stunner. When Maggie meets Alma to tell her about what happened with Hank the night before, there’s an imprecision to her language that seems to be deliberate, but it’s unclear if the ambiguity is deliberate on the part of Maggie or the screenplay. When Alma asks for concrete details, Maggie talks around the events of the previous night, with vague statements like “He crossed a line” and “When he left, I took a shower,” then lashing out when asked for more details. Is this a natural, understandable reaction to being asked to recount details of a traumatic experience when one is attempting to navigate describing that event without reliving its every moment, or is Maggie trying to compartmentalize a deliberate misrepresentation of the situation for some future leverage without overtly “lying”? Before Hank is fired, there’s a scene in which Maggie and Alma meet each other in the foyer of a rectory/lecture hall, when Alma asks Maggie if she went to a clinic after the incident so that any forensic evidence could be collected, and Maggie tells her that she walked to an off-campus clinic but never made it inside because she felt threatened by some men who were hanging around the place, but that she did see that there was a security camera that would have shown footage of her approaching, and that this, in combination with the fact that she went there immediately after seeing Alma, should be enough to establish a timeline of sorts that would indicate her intention to seek medical services even if she couldn’t go through with it. The statement veers between being completely understandable, as it’s become increasingly popular for men to hang around outside of women’s clinics to harass them, but also seems almost too-practiced, as Maggie “realizes” that she can put together some “evidence.” Edebiri’s ability to straddle this line, to where a reading that she’s a manipulative nepo baby playing on what Hank calls “a shallow cultural moment” is just as valid as a reading that she is telling the whole and complete truth from the beginning. There’s certainly the implication that Maggie was already getting some amount of special treatment before; when she doesn’t come to campus the morning following the Imhoffs’ party, Alma says something offhand about having already given her “too much rope.” 

Garfield is quite good at playing against type here as well, and the extent to which we can believe anything about his version of events is circumspect but also plausible. Even when he’s admitting (or “admitting”) to the singular error (or “singular error”) of going to a student’s home alone in the evening, he never slows down in devouring his lunch, which lends itself to an interpretation that the accusation is trivial. When he loses his job, he goes on a ranting tirade about having had to work three jobs to put himself through school and now that he’s on the precipice of tenure, he may lose everything because of an unverifiable accusation. It’s here that we hit on what is likely the greatest stumbling block about the movie, in that we live in a world in which any text that treats a false accusation of rape is problematic due to the negligible instances of this in reality, in comparison to the ocean of sexual assaults that remain unreported (and, when reported, handled indelicately, incorrectly, and with greater deference to the accused than the accuser). We live in a sexually violent society, and anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that is lying or living in denial, and there’s an argument to be made that predicating a piece of media on something which does not happen, especially when the characters stand to benefit from a false accusation in just the way that detractors of the reality of rape culture often claim they do, is dangerous. I can’t say that this is an unreasonable reason to take a stand against this film, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for taking the same issues with After the Hunt that many took with last year’s Strange Darling, even if the potential to infer misogyny is less textual here. Regardless, we never find out if Hank did it, or if he did how far things went, or if he did just enough to leave himself open to accusation. For my viewing companion, what clinched his guilt was a later scene in which Alma goes to a spare waterfront apartment she keeps as an academic retreat and finds Hank there, hiding out and using a spare key she forgot he had. He makes a move on her, and although it’s clear that a mutual attraction exists, Alma doesn’t give in, and it takes several declarations of “no” and a final violent shove before Hank leaves (exiting the film altogether, in fact). 

For Alma, all of this is colored by her own experience. This is a bit of a spoiler so skip ahead to the next paragraph if you would prefer not to know . . . We learn late in the film that Alma was herself a statutory victim when she was only fifteen years old. Her recollection of the “relationship” is itself warped, as she recalls the youthful crush that she had on a friend of her father’s, one that culminated in an ongoing sexual relationship that she recalls as having been sought and initiated by her, not the older man. She protests to her husband, who rightly points out that she was a child and that it is the responsibility of any adult who finds themselves pursued by a minor to—at a minimum—not acquiesce, that she threw herself at the man until he “relented,” and that she exposed him out of vengeance and spite when he entered a relationship with a woman his own age, and that this scandal led him to commit suicide three years later. She recanted her story publicly, but the guilt of his death is still something that she carries with her, and which over time has metamorphosed into a kind of emotional cancer, no doubt contributing to the perforated ulcers with which she struggles throughout the film. Regardless of whether Maggie is telling the truth or not, Alma’s statement to her that although what Maggie tells herself she’s seeking is restorative justice, what she’s actually attempting is revenge is about Alma, not Maggie; Maggie’s honesty about what happened the night of Alma’s party is immaterial because Alma perceives Maggie as repeating her own mistake, which has itself compounded and been sanitized and mythologized into a Herculan burden for Alma to bear alone to the point where it doesn’t reflect reality. 

Beyond the performances, the camera work and editing here are magnificent. There’s a lot of hand work, as Guadagnino frequently allows the camera to drift from close-ups (most in some kind of profile but frequently with direct-to-camera delivery, which created a kind of intimate space as if we in the audience were in conversation directly with Alma or Maggie) to focusing on the characters’ hands. It’s almost a joke, but it would take an Italian director to not only recognize the intrinsic value of talking with one’s hands but also to invoke the way that the eye tends to naturally drift away from eye contact during difficult conversations. It’s good stuff, and although I can see how it would easily get tiresome for a lot of moviegoers, this is a slow cinema allowance that I’m more than willing to make. The sound design is spectacular, with particular attention to a scene in which Frederik is catty to his wife because of how much he perceives that Maggie is using her, as he is as-yet unaware of the plot-driving accusation. He first interrogates Maggie about her primary PhD interest and, when she becomes defensive, he passive aggressively leaves the room and starts to play loud music from another part of the apartment, with the muffling of the sound provided by the swinging kitchen door intermittently allowing for blasts of electronica to interrupt the proceedings as he wordlessly enters and exits multiple times. It’s another scene that’s multi-layered, as we’re once again led to believe that Hank was telling some part of the truth, as Maggie can’t offer up a single reason why she’s so interested in her particular field of study or even an interesting fact for conversation. Is this because she’s still too traumatized and has come to Alma for comfort and understanding and can’t process Frederik’s question, or is she a mediocre student coasting on privilege and plagiarism? 

There’s extensive discussion of intergenerational practices of ethical philosophy here, and I’m not sure that all of the heady ideas land, but it’s a fascinating conversation that the film has with you. Chloë Sevigny is also present, as Dr. Kim Sayers, Alma’s friend and a practicing psychiatrist. Although Kim vocally objects to a man at Alma’s party saying that if the university decides to hand out only one tenureship between Hank and Alma, it will go to the latter because of “the current moment” regardless of either professor’s individual accolades or achievements, she also agrees with Hank’s sentiments that the current generation of students are too coddled and soft. Elsewhere, that relationship between the two different generations is manifested in Alma’s acceptance of Maggie’s “lesbianism” (Maggie never calls herself that and is in a relationship with a transmasc nonbinary person) but has to be continuously reminded that Maggie’s partner uses they/them pronouns; Alma’s accusation that Maggie’s relationship is more about gaining clout in the current political environment than love clearly hits close to home. This shows that Alma agrees with Hank and Kim to an extent, as when she confronts Maggie late in the film, she criticizes the younger woman for faking her way through academia, crossing a line when she says that Maggie’s phoniness (including her relationship) is what makes it so easy for people to think that women are crying wolf in these situations. It’s a sweeping generalization about an entire generation, but more to the point, it’s once again Alma projecting all of her own trauma onto Maggie, as Alma, at least in the narrative of her life that she tells herself, did in fact “cry wolf,” and it’s those words from the German newspaper article Maggie found in Alma’s home that are the first to be translated for us on screen. 

I’m not surprised that this one is divisive, and I can’t pretend that I’m all-in on this particular narrative device given its real-world ramifications, but this is a marvelous work from a directorial maestro. Challengers left me pretty cold, and I completely missed Queer so I can’t speak to it, but this one has me back on board. I have no doubt that we will soon be inundated with think pieces about how Guadagnino’s usage of Stuhlbarg to deliver a monologue about how what happened to Alma in her youth was not her fault and that she was used by an older man regardless of whether she initiated it or not is a commentary on the changing cultural reception and perception of Call Me By Your Name in the intervening years since the film was released. I’m not particularly looking forward to those days, and the derisive reaction from most of the general public to this one means that we won’t see it become as memetic as Challengers was (not to mention that the subject matter does not lend itself to that here), so this may simply sink without much attention. I think that would be a shame. I’ve already sung Edebiri and Garfield’s praises, but this is a terrific and nuanced performance from Roberts, at turns inhuman and too human, often unsure of herself but with a mask of confidence, projecting confusion when she’s certain of herself. She’s terrific, and so is the film. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Armand (2025)

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There is currently an American remake of Andrei Żuławski’s monstrous divorce meltdown Possession in the works, to be directed by Smile‘s Parker Finn and produced by Robert Pattinson. The project is both catastrophically misguided and totally understandable. Just a decade ago, it was difficult to access the 1981 political psych thriller through any official, legal means, which afforded it a kind of cult-curio prestige. The full-bodied mania of Isabelle Adjani’s performance in out-of-context clips in which she writhes in a tunnel while smashing her groceries against the concrete wall got passed around the internet enough that it gradually became a staple of online film culture, though, initiated by its copyright-infringing use in the Crystal Castles music video for “Plague.” A few expensive physical-media reissues & short streaming-platform stints later, and Possession is now an official part of the canon. There’s even enough evidence to argue that Adjani’s interpretive-dance tunnel freakout is the most influential movie scene of the current moment. It was cited as direct inspiration for at least three of last year’s biggest horror-heroine performances (Nosferatu, Immaculate, The First Omen), and now some poor actress will be tasked with retracing Adjani’s exact steps in a mainstream remake removed from its original cultural & political context — the final stage in legitimizing any once-subversive piece of art.

Adjani’s interpretive-dance freakout is now so cinematically ubiquitous that it’s influencing procedural dramas about tense parent-teacher conferences, not just horror flicks. The Norwegian film Armand is mostly structured as a stage play in a single primary school classroom wherein two couples argue about a physical altercation between their 6-year-old sons, as mediated by a timid schoolteacher and her hard-nosed administrative higher-ups. In the initial telling of the story, the titular child Armand is accused of having sexually assaulted his playmate in a school bathroom, an event that neither (unseen) child has the full vocabulary to communicate to the confused, horrified adults. Every parent and school employee has a hidden, selfish agenda in how they react to this crisis, which is slowly teased out in a web of secrets & resentments that link the two families far beyond the transgression they’re currently debating. It’s Armand’s mother Elizabeth who’s afforded the most complex internal life, though, as performed by Renate “Worst Person in the World” Reinsve. As the intensity of the parent-teacher conference escalates, she has a full psychotic breakdown that destroys all decorum by releasing something monstrously inhuman in the room, transforming a small-scale drama into a full-blown psych thriller merely by laughing & crying with violent intensity at unpredictable intervals. Armand might have gotten the title, but the movie is Elizabeth’s story.

It’s when Elizabeth steps into the school’s hallways & empty classrooms that the movie goes full Possession. The whispered rumors that spiral out of that closed-door meeting haunt her like vengeful ghosts as they echo off of every hard surface to the point of supernatural cacophony. Her public-figure role as a semi-famous actress combines with the scrutiny of her mothering technique to give her the feeling of constantly being pawed at from every direction, which is literalized by the imagined hands of fellow parents roughly groping her flesh in interpretive dance. The proceedings are coldly clerical in nature, but there’s an erotic violence to the tone that reverberates throughout the building, frequently turning moments of heated intimacy into physical abuse as parents & staff siphon each other off into empty rooms. Whether abuse is learned or inherited and whether you can ever fully separate truth from spin provide the film a thematic justification for what’s mostly just an excuse to rattle the audience, often through unexpected nosebleeds, fire alarms, and thundercracks. First-time director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel is playing a game of tonal precarity here, unlocking something intangibly evil in a parent-teacher conference the way Possession unlocks something intangibly evil in a simple act of adultery or, more notably, a trip to the grocer. My comparing Reinsve to Adjani is probably doing her performance no favors, but she does hold her own among other recent actresses who’ve explicitly stated that’s where they’re drawing their inspo.

It’s entirely possible that no one making Armand had Possession in mind during production. As the nepo-grandbaby of Ingmar Bergman & Liv Ullman, Tøndel has plenty of under-the-surface menace to pull from just within his own family’s cinematic legacy. Where & when he chooses to break from reality in this psychological meltdown felt Possession adjacent to me, though, especially by the time the cast breaks into violent, abstract dance. By default, it’s a more compelling, interpretive use of Possession’s influence than any straight-forward Hollywood remake could be, regardless of whether the influence was conscious. The influence is unavoidable right now, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do something new with it.

-Brandon Ledet

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024)

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In the opening scene of Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, a young woman dressed as Missy “Supa Dupa Fly” Elliott drives alone on an unlit Zambian highway, abruptly pausing to inspect a dead body in the road.  Remaining in costume, she makes several nonchalant phone calls to family, notifying them that she has discovered the corpse of her Uncle Fred.  No one seems to be in a particular rush to help, and she’s reluctantly roped into the petty concerns of her party-drunk father, her more belligerently drunk cousin, her absent mother, and a police force that can’t arrive until morning because their one vehicle is already in use.  It’s only after Uncle Fred is scooped off the road in the morning hours that she can finally take off her comically oversized Missy Elliott costume and return to her regular self as the prodigal urbanite daughter, Shula (Susan Chardy).  Uncle Fred is also stripped of his costume in those daylight hours, as the sins of his living days are revealed by stripping away the respectability afforded to all corpses at their own funeral.  We quickly understand why Shula met Uncle Fred’s death with such an icy, deadpan detachment, and by then the joke isn’t funny anymore.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl starts on a sharp streak of morbid humor, then gets increasingly nauseating the deeper it digs into the Patriarchal sins it unearths, which is also how I remember Nyoni’s debut, I Am Not a Witch.  It’s a film about the value of a whisper network, likening its titular bird’s usefulness on African savannahs as a warning-signal for nearby animals that a predator is approaching to women who warn each other of a nearby sexual predator’s potential to harm.  The problem, of course, is that guinea fowl’s usefulness to other animals does little to save their own hides, as they presumably squawk their way into being eaten while everyone else scurries away.  We come to learn that Uncle Fred left many victims in his wake, notoriously preying on underage girls in his family & community with no consequences, since the advice his victims are given by their matron elders is “Don’t think about it, and don’t talk about it.”  There’s no real way to hold the now-dead man accountable, but Shula becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that his crimes against his own people should go undiscussed, and she subtly, gradually takes on the behaviors of a guinea fowl the longer his sham of a funeral drags on.  Maybe she can be a useful warning to others about the dangers of men like Fred; or maybe her animal noises of protest will only separate her out as a target for more cruelty.

Besides the gender politics of Shula’s quiet resistance to her family’s loving memory of Uncle Fred, Guinea Fowl is most engaging as an alienating look at Zambian funeral rituals.  Every aspect of Uncle Fred’s days-long funeral is seemingly designed to trigger Shula: her required presence, the women’s critique of each other’s crying techniques, the men outside who drink beer in wait of the women in the home to feed them after they perform the labor of mourning, the world-class victim-blaming of Uncle Fred’s teenage widow for failing to keep him alive, etc.  Meanwhile, Shula’s relationship with reality unravels as she dissociates from the absurd celebration of such a wicked man.  Her dreams & memories become increasingly intrusive, interrupting the flow of the narrative with images of her younger self observing Uncle Fred’s body, images of that body resurrected and covered in maxi pads, and vintage 1990s broadcasts of children’s television shows detailing the natural behaviors of the guinea fowl.  Those intrusions call into question the real-world credibility of other details like the floodwater floors of a local university or the music-video pool party atmosphere of the local library.  The film never fully tips into the fantasy realm, though; it just precariously teeters on the edge between worlds as Shula calculates what to do with her voice as one of Uncle Fred’s surviving victims.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl locally premiered at this year’s New Orleans Film Festival, where it was initially met with the soft laughter of recognition until the room went coldly silent the more we all realized what kind of story we were watching.  It’s an especially tough watch if you belong to a family that stubbornly ignores its worst members’ most heinous crimes for the sake of social politeness, which I assume accounts for just about everyone.  And if it doesn’t, please know that I am jealous. 

-Brandon Ledet

How to Have Sex (2024)

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In the somber Brits-on-holiday drama How to Have Sex, a trio of teen besties spend a week getting wasted drunk at a Greek resort built to house teens getting wasted drunk.  If they were teen boys in the early aughts, this would be a boneheaded boner comedy about virginal losers’ bumbling attempts to get laid for the first time among the Girls Gone Wild college crowd.  Since they’re teen girls in a modern drama, that same mission to ditch their virginal status before the return flight home plays like a horror film.  How to Have Sex dredged up some deeply unpleasant memories of my first couple years on my own at a binge-drinking “party college”, as well as more recent memories of being dragged out of the house by friends for a nightmarish stroll down Bourbon Street.  It’s just as terrifying onscreen as it is in person, especially the longer you sit with how realistic it is to a lot of people’s first sexual experiences inside those neon-lit Hell pits.  This is not just a film about the way alcohol violently fuels the flames of social pressure; it’s also a film about rape, even though everyone shows up eager to get each other in bed.

Mia McKenna-Bruce stars as our POV character, Taz, who travels to a MTV Spring Break-style hedonist resort with the sole intention of getting drunk and shedding her virginity.  The resort comes with its own pre-planned parties & mating rituals designed to make that dream come true, mostly by getting the already horny hordes of kids so blotto on grain alcohol that they can’t remember whether or not they’ve actually, finally done it.  There’s no room for authentic connection or intimate interaction within the cacophony of that DJ dance party dystopia, in which all the world’s a 24-hour nightclub.  It would be easy, then, to script a physically violent rape between strangers there, but first time writer-director Molly Manning Walker instead scripts a more common, less sensational kind of sexual trauma.  This is a story about the gradual erosion of consent by someone Taz knows.  She vulnerably puts herself out there for consensual sex but is rejected; then she is isolated, pressured to consent to acts she’s uncomfortable with, and then physically overpowered by her abuser once her will is fully worn down.  It’s tough to watch, mostly because it’s true to life.

In terms of recent erosion-of-consent stories about the gender politics of sexual assault, How to Have Sex is not nearly as feverishly overcharged as the service-industry thriller The Royal Hotel, nor as politically didactic as the porno-industry exposé Pleasure.  It deliberately avoids glamorizing the allure of the nonstop nightclub atmosphere, sticking to the grating, real-world details of teens sloppily gobbling cheese fries & screeching karaoke instead of depicting the fantasy of the fabulous night they’re having in their heads.  It might reframe the debaucherous mise-en-scène of a vintage Skins episode through clear-eyed sobriety of docu-fiction, but what it lacks in ecstatic cinematic style it more than makes up for in depth of character.  Taz is a real person to us, not just a symbolic victim or a political mechanism.  After her assault, she continues to think, feel, act, and react in ways that are authentic to real-life human behavior, which only amplifies the sinister inauthenticity of the world around her.  McKenna-Bruce plays the part with heartbreaking sweetness & insecurity, while Walker surrounds her with just enough sense-memory detail to put the audience right back in her ankle-breaking heels. It’s a scarily vulnerable feeling.

-Brandon Ledet

Cuddly Toys (2023)

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They grow up so fast!  It seems like just yesterday Kansas Bowling was a teenage backyard filmmaker making horror-blog headlines with her debut feature B.C. Butcher, like the Tromaville equivalent of Lights Camera Jackson.   Now she’s an all-growed-up twentysomething edgelord, touring the country with her mondo genre throwback Cuddly Toys – officially graduating from enfant to enfant terrible.  Bowling’s recent visit to New Orleans felt like a mandatory cultural event even though I generally hate the retro mondo movies Cuddly Toys spoofs & subverts; I just had to see what other local schlock gobblers are excited about her work, since the things I knew her from felt so obscure: the aforementioned caveman slasher comedy B.C. Butcher, the Jackass style gorilla-on-the-loose slasher comedy Psycho Ape, and an excellent, years-old episode of the sorely missed Switchblade Sisters podcast in which she eloquently praises the psychedelic Monkees vehicle Head.  That curiosity led me somewhat astray, trapping me in a small theater with boisterous horror-bro laughter at some of the cruelest, gnarliest violence in Cuddly Toys, then forcing me to confront the possibility that some of that sour humor was intentional on the director’s end – given that she seems to have a genuine appreciation for the mondo schlock of olde.  You could even feel her genuine mondo appreciation in the film’s traveling road show presentation, which was likely inspired by mainstream distributors being weary of touching such sordid material but also feels true to the regional exhibition of the genre’s grindhouse heyday.

To be fair, Cuddly Toys isn’t as purely exploitative as vintage mondo schlock like Mondo Cane, Faces of Death, or whatever obscure, racist cannibalsploitation relic your friend’s scuzzy older brother dared you to watch at an unsupervised sleepover.  Bowling appears onscreen as “Professor Kansas Bowling”, recent graduate of teen-life university, narrating a feature-length slideshow with the same faux-educational tone of vintage mondo.  Her presentation includes references to distinctly 2010s teen life but is shot on 16mm film stock to match the look of her satirical target.  Her “academic” lecture to the clueless parents of America is pitched as a scare film about their teen daughter’s delinquent behavior when they leave the relative safety of home.  In practice, she’s “documenting” the horrific daily life of the typical teenage girl by mixing real-life interviews about rape & misogynist abuse with comically exaggerated depictions of rape & misogynist abuse. Like in true mondo tradition, it’s difficult to parse out what authentic snippets of real life are lurking in the exploitation sleaze bucket that swallows it, except now you also have to parse out what’s intended as irony vs what’s sincere.  Also in true mondo tradition, I often hated the experience of watching it, even though I’m hopelessly attracted to vintage sexploitation of its ilk (of which only Russ Meyer’s Mondo Topless is innocent).  Every time I watch a 70s grindhouse relic for the first time, I always brace myself for sexual assault imagery that lingers a couple beats past making its point, and Cuddly Toys is queasily accurate to that tradition, even if its point is nobler than the vintage films it mimics.

And yet, I can’t totally dismiss the bratty outsider-art feminism of this D.I.Y. bombthrower.  Cuddly Toys makes admirable gestures to link the sexual violence of subcultural teen life in the 1970s with subcultural teen life now, even directly referencing Marilyn Manson’s despicable revival of the stadium-rock groupie era.  Despite ostensibly being structured as an academic lecture, it also does a good job of avoiding direct moralist instruction, both by muddling its Feminism 101 talking points with shocks of edgelord irony and by intercutting its testimonials and re-enactments in a deliberately messy, experimental editing style.  Somewhere in all its shock-value leering of underage sex & misogynist violence, there’s an earnest, soul-deep interest in the inner lives of American teen girls, recalling Lauren Greenfield’s portraiture of Californian teens in the 1990s.  It can be outright beautiful in individual, intimate moments, often straying from the mondo genre send-up at hand to promote Bowling’s side hustle as a prolific music video director.  In general, I found Cuddly Toys much more compelling as a sketchbook-in-motion for Bowling’s loose assemblage of Movie Ideas than as a satirical mondo throwback.  It appeared to be shot over several years in cities as far-spanning as LA, NYC, Vegas, and Mexico City, automatically making it a much denser & more personal work than B.C. Butcher, which was shot in a single week just outside Bowling’s childhood home.  In its best form, it functions as a kind of avant-garde travel diary, which is fitting for a movie in which a loose collection of wayward teens read semi-fictional selections from their own personal diaries, documented in their densely over-decorated bedrooms.

All of my self-conflicted handwringing about this film’s various failures & successes results from watching a director I find fascinating dabble in a genre I find distasteful.  Distastefulness appears to be a personal interest of Bowling’s, though, so I can’t fault her for trying to mine something politically powerful out of the vintage schlock she watches for fun.  For my sake, I hope her revival of kitsch genre relics leads her to make something more akin to nudie cuties than roughies in the future, but that’s an entirely selfish impulse.  Judging by the alternation between howling laughter and stunned silence in that Cuddly Toys audience, it’s apparent she has plenty enthusiastic devotees to what she’s already accomplishing – way more than I thought to expect.

-Brandon Ledet

Women Talking (2022)

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Thanks to the secretive background maneuvers of the Almighty Algorithm, the very first thing I saw online after my private screening of Women Talking was a few viciously negative tweets declaring it one of the worst movies of the year.  I understood them, even though I do not agree.  Sarah Polley’s latest is a stage play adaptation of a hot-topic novel, one with prescriptive declarations to make about the rigidly gendered power dynamics of mass-scale sexual assault.  It’s an opportunity for some of the most critically lauded actors in Hollywood—Frances McDormand, Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley—to dress up in rural-America poverty costumes and deliver perfectly tailored Oscar-clip soundbites with industry-damning implications about the post-Weinstein fallout of #MeToo.  It’s also visually ugly, recalling a 2000s era switch to digi filmmaking that used to clog up the broadcast schedules of IFC and the Sundance Channel (back when they used to play movies at all).  I totally understand how someone could be coldly cynical about Women Talking as Bad Art with Good Politics.  Personally, I found it to be crushingly powerful from start to end, more than I had emotionally steeled myself for.  Even its drained, pallid color palette, which looks like a fundamental flaw from the outside, completely works in the moment.  Everything in the film is grim, grey, grueling – even its stabs of humor.  It’s an earnest, wounded, furious howl into the soulless abyss of traditional gender dynamics.  Like any political protest, you can either join in its righteous chorus for personal, communal catharsis, or observe how small & ineffective it looks from a distance.

Inspired by true events, Miriam Towe’s source-material novel details the aftermath of the habitual, conspiratorial rape of women in an isolated Mennonite community in the 2010s.  Drugged with livestock tranquilizers and assaulted in the night, the women were told that these acts of violence were “the work of ghosts or Satan [. . .] or a wild female imagination” by their abusers, communally gaslit until those same men were caught in the act.  Thankfully, Polley only revisits these violations in flashes.  Most of the film details a hayloft meeting where the women decide what to do now that the men’s crimes have been exposed: leave, fight, or forgive.  The camera drifts around the barn in an attempt to make cinema out of this stationary debate, recalling William Friedkin’s tight-set stage play adaptations The Birthday Party & The Boys in the Band.  Mostly, though, this is a movie of ideas not images, as indicated by its dim, dingy color grading.  As the women draw up very simple Pros & Cons lists for each of their painfully shitty options, the deliberation gets broadly philosophical in a way that reaches far beyond the specifics of this particular atrocity.  It starts with the tension between the impossibility of forgiving such a heinous act and the possible denial of access to Heaven if that forgiveness is withheld.  From there, they push past the religious implications of their decision to ponder more universal conundrums about the violence men put women through on a mass scale, and whether the pleasure of their company as individuals is worth the potential harm of their power as a unit.  Both within the context of this story and in the world outside it, there are no easy answers.

There were a couple fleeting moments in Women Talking where I was disappointed by how literal & straightforward Polley was being in her messaging.  The movie gets its point across plenty clearly without horror-tinged flashbacks to victims smearing their blood on bedroom walls or onscreen text declaring “What follows is an act of female imagination.”  As a dialogue-driven Movie of Ideas, however, I can only report that it weighed heavily on my mind & heart.  Despite their shared religious beliefs, the titular women are all drastically varied in age, experience, bodies, and temperaments.  The only thing that unites them, really, is their victimization by the other half of the colony; they are united by hurt, anger, and grief.  Even the “woman” narrating the story is a child’s voice, a sharp indicator of how predatory men see their fellow human beings.  This is not an easy sit.  It’s typical to the types of two-plus-hour misery dramas that crowd the movie release calendar this time of year.  It asks bigger, more devastating questions than most Awards Season weepies tend to, though, even if its philosophical prodding can easily be mistaken for political didacticism.  And since its initial ecstatic praise out of the festival circuit is now being swatted back by a few loud, indignant cynics on Twitter, I assume it’s going places.  It’s going to reach, challenge, and upset a lot of people – as long as they’re willing to engage with its troubling questions beyond initial reactions to its muted imagery.

-Brandon Ledet

Elle (2016)

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onehalfstar

In all honesty, I’m probably the last person that should be writing this review. Paul Verhoeven’s latest is the exact kind of fearless, subversive button pusher that I typically enjoy from the director’s back catalog of all-time greats. It just happens to be a button pusher that centers its controversial mode of black comedy on rape. Sexual assault is more or less the only taboo in cinema that actually offends me when it’s treated lightly & without proper thematic consequence. It’s likely that I did not “get” Verhoeven’s Elle because of that personal hangup. The film opens with a brutal rape, which is repeated several times in greater detail and subsequently followed by increasingly crueler acts of sexual violence, but asks you to move on and shrug off the trauma as if it were nothing of any significance. Elle vaguely echoes ideas about what it’s like to mentally relive a trauma once it’s “behind you,” having to encounter your abuser in public social settings without acknowledging the transgression, the ineffectiveness of reporting sexual assault to police, and the misogynistic & sexually repressed aspects of modern culture that lead to rape in the first place, but all of those concepts exist in the film as indistinct whispers. Mostly, the rape is treated like a cheap murder mystery, with all of the typical red herrings & idiotic jump scares you’d expect in a whodunit. It’s a paralyzing trauma that has little effect on the story outside the scenes where it’s coldly detailed onscreen and the real shame is that it sours what is otherwise an excellently performed black comedy & character study by leaving very little room for laughter, if any.

Isabelle Huppert stars as the titular character in this glib rape revenge blood-boiler. Michelle is a video game developer who finds herself at a crossroads in her life with every one of her family members, friends, neighbors, and coworkers. Among these faces is an assailant who repeatedly rapes her in her own home while wearing gloves & a ski mask, a transgression made painfully real to the audience as soon as the credits begin. The movie sets up two mysteries in its early machinations: Who is Michelle’s rapist & what crimes did her father commit in the distant past to make her entire family a dysfunctional band of social pariahs? Only the latter mystery is at all interesting, but the former eats up the majority of the runtime, leaving little room for any other narrative to take hold. It’s difficult to get lost in Elle‘s dark, complexly humorous relationships with her mother, her business partners, her employees, her neighbors, and her son when the film keeps drawing your attention back to the constant threat of sexual assault, which is a much less interesting & more overly familiar dynamic. Worse yet, it asks you to chuckle quietly at the calm, blasé way she processes the trauma, a line of humor that’s never close to being amusing, unlike the character-driven comedy the film sacrifices to pursue it. It’s a credit to the cast, Huppert especially, that Elle is even watchable for the entire length of its bloated, coldly harrowing runtime. Everything from Verhoeven’s detached tone to the screenplay’s core concepts alienate me on such a deeply spiritual level that I’m having a difficult time grasping why people find the film entertaining and how it ended up earning so much critical acclaim, including from mainstream outlets like the Golden Globes.

As I said, I’m the exact wrong audience for this film. If tasked with editing & re-shooting Elle, I’d cut it down to a swift black comedy about a publicly disgraced, wealthy family struggling to put their lives back together; imagine an art film version of Arrested Development and you get the picture. That’s obviously not the film Verhoeven & Huppert set out to make, though, and I have as little interest in engaging with their cruelly detached rape revenge comedy/thriller as the film has engaging with its own themes of sexual assault. It’s not that I think rape is a topic wholly off-limits as a cinematic subject. Two of my favorite films from the last couple years, Felt & The Neon Demon, trafficked heavily in themes of threatened sexual assault. I just think that if you’re going to bring it up (and especially if you’re going to depict it several times in brutal detail with a comedic fallout), you owe it to the audience to make sure the trauma is thematically significant. If Elle fulfilled that requirement in any way, it’s safe to say that I didn’t “get” the film on a fundamental level. I’m totally okay with that being the case.

-Brandon Ledet

The Stendhal Syndrome (1996)

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fourstar

After watching Trauma and seeing the premonitions of failure in Dario Argento’s later works that the film possessed, La Sindrome di Stendhal (The Stendhal Syndrome) was surprisingly refreshing in its successes. That’s not to say that Syndrome is perfect; there’s a lot wrong with this movie, including multiple sexual assaults, a killer with impenetrable motivations, some really bad effects, and disturbingly dark sexual politics. If you can overlook those problems, there’s a decent mystery here and a fresh twist, even if it is predicated on a skewed sense of gender dynamics and a warped understanding of trauma. This review, like this movie, is quite triggering with regards to sexual assault, so be warned. Also, spoilers.

Anna Manni (Asia Argento, appearing in one of her father’s films for the second time) fled her small home city at an early age to escape her unhappy family life; now, she’s a police inspector in Rome. She is involved in an unfulfilling romantic relationship with her partner Marco (Marco Leonardi, of Cinema Paradiso and Once Upon a Time in Mexico), which has become increasingly strained as the two investigate a serial rapist who has recently begun to murder his victims as well. Anna’s detective work leads her to Florence, where she receives an anonymous tip that leads her to the world-famous Uffizi Gallery. She is overcome by the titular syndrome, a psychosomatic reaction to an intensely profound experience (usually exposure to art) with physiological effects, and faints, splitting her lip and experiencing a bout of amnesia.

Of course, this is not made evident at the outset. The film opens with the unidentified Anna at the Uffizi Gallery, where she is “transported” into Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Bruegel, as the waves in the painting suddenly move and she finds herself flying over the CGI water before falling in and kissing a fish with a human-ish face (which is never explained). While I don’t think it was a bad idea to obfuscate the narrative from the outset, necessarily, this is a strange scene that doesn’t set the mood for the rest of the film, and I would argue that failing to express a thesis for such a prolonged time before the plot appears is one of the film’s failings.

Anna faints after the Icarus weirdness and is helped to her feet by a handsome man, whom she will later learn is named Alfredo Grossi (Thomas Kretschmann). Having lost her memory, Anna finds her hotel using the room key in her pocket. That evening, she enters another fugue state during which a reproduction of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch dissolves and she passes through it into a memory of one of the serial rapist/killer’s crime scenes, where we learn why she was in Florence. Then, suddenly, she’s back in her hotel room where the rapist is revealed to be Alfredo, who assaults Anna.

Let’s not mince words here: this is a deeply, deeply fucked up scene. This is by far Argento’s darkest movie, and I don’t say that lightly. Criticism of Argento’s early work often referenced a perception of his work as being misogynistic and glorifying both sexual objectification and sexual violence. In those works, however, any sexual assault was only referenced or alluded to, while here the rape is shown, in detail, with physical violence including punches and slashing. In The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, the rape that is later revealed to be a motivating factor for the killer is referred to as a crime that occurred ten years prior and depicted only in the artwork of a demented hermit painter. The closest that his earlier work has come to this was in the flashbacks that motivated the killer in Tenebrae, in which he was physically assaulted on the beach and a beautiful woman molested him with the red heels that would become his obsession. There was a quiet understatement in those earlier works that is not present here, with its horrifying first person points of view of both victim and assailant, and the scene feels like it goes on forever. It’s exploitative, frankly, even before you take into account that this character was portrayed by Argento’s daughter. or the fact that it will happen again.

Afterwards, the drugged Anna awakes during Alfredo’s next crime and watches as he murders his next victim, which he seems to do solely for Anna’s viewing. She flees and returns to Rome, where her boss, Inspector Manetti (Luigi Diberti), places her under the care of psychiatrist Dr. Cavanna (Paolo Bonacelli) and recommends she spend some time with her family. Anna visits her father (John Quentin), and reminisces with her brothers about how her mother used to take her to the nearby museum to look at the art, where she experienced Stendhal Syndrome for the first time. She also cuts her hair and begins dressing in men’s traditional clothing, affecting a more masculine look as she trains as a boxer and begins creating paintings of her own, all of them of a screaming face. Alfredo tracks her down, and after assaulting her again and leaving her handcuffed and tied down to a mattress for several hours, he returns, but she is able to overtake him and exact some Rasputinian revenge: first she shoots him, then beats him, and breaks his neck, before throwing him into a river.

Anna returns to Rome, her personality further affected as she now wears a long blonde wig to cover scars from her assault and dresses only in white dresses. It is at this point that the police learn Alfredo’s identity, but Anna remains unconvinced that he has been vanquished. She strikes up a relationship with a Frenchman named Marie, an art student. When he, too, is murdered, the police search for Alfredo begins again.

There are a lot of problems here, foremost among them the representation of rape and sexual assault mentioned above. The revelation that Alfredo truly is dead and has been dead for weeks while the murders continue reveals that Anna’s repeated traumas have caused her to become a killer as well, and she ultimately reveals that Alfredo’s body is dead but he remains inside her. One way to read the implication of this is that the fractured psyches of victims of assault eventually lead them to become violent and psychopathic as well, which is just awful. It’s almost impossible to defend this choice either, especially when combined with other problematic elements here; for instance, one of the earlier rape victims that Alfredo left alive is interviewed by Anna, and she compares her assault, favorably, to sex with her boorish husband. There are huge sections of this narrative that are reprehensible at best, and that’s undeniable.

There are visual problems here as well. I’m not sure if the problem was a result of a bad transfer in the edition that I watched (it was a Troma DVD, after all), but the whole film looks like it was shot on video, which has the overall effect of causing it to feel both dated and cheap. It also reduces the impact of the artwork that’s shown throughout the movie, as it’s hard to imagine anyone being affected by the artwork when everything looks like a flat, bargain brand imitation rather than the real thing. Syndrome also has the distinction of being the first Italian film to use CGI, and Argento’s reasoning behind which images he chose to utilize this new technology to create are baffling. The CGI waves that emerge from Icarus actually look quite good, especially for a movie from 1996, but CGI is also used to follow a couple of pills that Anna swallows down her throat, for no apparent thematic reason. There are a few such scenes, where the images are unnecessary and silly looking, and as such are terribly distracting.

There’s also the fact that Anna, at such a young age (Asia was 20), seems far too young to be as professionally accomplished as she supposedly is. Further, there’s a general problem regarding whether or not Stendhal Syndrome is anything more that pseudopsychology. Still, this is a movie that’s quite good, in spite of all of its ethical and mechanical issues. The nonlinear narrative is at first confusing, but works better on reflection, as Syndrome acts as a kind of film version of a painting. What separates art and sculpture from prose, film, drama, and music is that those media incorporate time as an element of the story, progressing in a more or less linear fashion from beginning to end. Paintings and sculptures do not have this luxury, and thus must evoke an emotional rapport and create a rhetorical space through a still image, implying motion with static visuals. Syndrome, in many ways, acts as a series of set pieces that are presented out of order, and must be ordered after viewing. You cannot read The Night Watch from left to right like a sentence; you first see the figures highlighted by chiaroscuro, and then focus on other faces, or the figures’ clothing. Syndrome is much the same, and the attempt to recreate this kind of experience on film is laudable in its audacity and its success. I simply wish that they appeared in a movie that was praiseworthy for the content of its story as well, and that didn’t work so hard to make the audience feel Anna’s violation so viscerally and exploitatively.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Mi mefakhed mehaze’ev hara (aka Big Bad Wolves, 2014)

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threehalfstar

(Trigger Warning: Child Abuse and Sexual Assault)

What is a monster? We live in a world where we know, with a reasonable degree of certainty, that there are no vampires, no werewolves, no scarred demons with razor gloves stalking our dreamscapes with the power to make our nightmare deaths carry over into the waking world. Films featuring antagonists that no rational person could legitimately fear, like a children’s doll haunted by the soul of a serial killer or an evil leprechaun covered in carcinomas, belong to the realm of fantasy. Thus, contemporary horror often confines itself to the plausible, in many ways becoming more like thrillers than the traditional horror films of yore. Our modern monster has to be a person, someone who could be your neighbor or simply a fellow citizen who happens to be a stranger, capable of doing something monstrous. For the past couple of decades, this phantom has to be someone capable of committing that most heinous of crimes–child molestation and murder.

The problem with this, of course, is that those of us in the West have become horribly desensitized to it. For seventeen seasons (and counting), Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has shown episode after episode dealing with the neat, patly handled aftermath of sexual assault, especially of children. Every other crime or investigative drama of the new millennium has also featured rape of children as a plot point multiple times. Chris Hanson turned pedophile hunting into a frenzied spectator sport with To Catch a Predator–not that this isn’t something that law enforcement should be doing, but turning the deception and capture of child molesters into entertainment? What the actual fuck? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the commodification and de facto pursuant trivialization of sexual assault and abuse, virtually always of women and often of children, has led to the horrifying explosion of misogynists, rape culture opportunists and deniers, and people who are generally unmoved by the suffering of others. Cultural sensitivities have been numbed by decades of exploitation of those most in need of understanding and protection.

As a result, a thriller that creates great tension and remains (mostly) non-exploitative while dealing with a child murderer in an appropriate way is a rarity, and 2013 Israeli film Mi mefakhed mehaze’ev hara (literally “Who fears the bad wolf,” released in English-speaking markets as Big Bad Wolves in 2014) is a surprisingly good watch, barring two major problems. It’s a thematically sound, lean and taut ride from start to finish.

The plot follows three men. The first two we meet at Micki (Lior Ashkenazi) and Dror (Rotem Keinan); Dror is a Tanakh teacher who has been apprehended by a quartet of punch-happy police, led by Micki, in connection with the abduction of a girl who went missing during a game of hide-and-seek. They take him to a seemingly empty warehouse and rough him up before taking him in for processing; unbeknownst to them, they are filmed by a teenager who happens to have been hanging out in the abandoned building. Commissioner Tsvika (Dvir Benedek) pulls Micki from the case, initially demoting him for his actions before firing him once the video goes viral. Meanwhile, Dror finds himself already having been judged guilty in the court of public opinion after he is released and is ostracized. An anonymous tip leads the police to the missing girl’s corpse, which is missing its head (meaning she cannot be truly put to rest under traditional Judaic law, although this is not explicitly mentioned in the film) and bears signs of sexual assault; she is not the first. The girl’s father, Gidi (Tzahi Grad), concocts a plan to torture Dror in order to find out where his daughter’s head is.

At the film’s core, the thematic intention is to call into question our convictions about good and evil. Is Dror guilty? What if he’s innocent? And, if he is guilty, does that justify that’s done to him, so graphically and brutally? Even if all that happens is a revisitation of the murderer’s crimes, will recreating those horrors really bring Gidi or Micki closure? Is everyone really a monster? This is beautifully delineated in the way that Dror and Micki act as reflections of each other. Once the video is released showing Micki and his fellow officers beating Dror, both lose their jobs; Dror is fired from the school due to parental complaints, and Micki is let go from the force for participating in the assault (with the unstated, implicit reason being that his firing is less for the event itself than for the fact that he was stupid enough to get caught doing it). Both the head of the school and the chief of police say that the dismissal is temporary, and that each man will come back to his respective position once everything blows over. Both men are estranged from their wives, causing them to feel distant from their daughters (Gidi is also estranged from his wife, and, of course, his daughter is dead).

Despite being an engrossing and cinematically pristine film, there are several factors that simply cannot be ignored with regards to the film. First and foremost, it’s reprehensibly irresponsible to portray the documenting of police brutality as being a greater social ill than the brutality itself. Many of the events of the narrative could have been prevented had the video not come to light, but the film doesn’t lay the blame at the feet of the policemen who are beating a suspect, instead having the characters lament that they were caught. No spoilers–I’ll simply say that this movie would have had an unambiguously happy ending had Micki and crew followed procedure in the first place.

But there’s an even greater problem here. There’s only one woman in this movie: the realtor (Nati Kluger). There are also a few young girls, obviously, but none of them ever speak or have any autonomy at all. Arguably, there’s a certain unavoidable lack of complete agency for all children, given that they require caretaking, but contrast this to the way we are presented with the chief’s son, who is actualizing his hero worship of his father and being empowered by his father’s knowledge and guidance. He’s treated like a person, which is more than can be said for any of the adult women who are heard (and never seen) in this movie. Every single man who makes up the core of this ensemble has a wife, a woman who exists entirely offscreen, appearing only as a disembodied voice on the phone. This is a fantastic movie, taught and evocative and timely, but there’s just something about the fact that this is a revenge movie in which three men exact harsh torture upon a fourth, with all of them being motivated by the rape and murder of a voiceless girl with a formless mother.

The last time I saw a plot that handled all the elements on display here with the same kind of tension, ambiguity, and deftness was 2005’s Hard Candy, starring Patrick Wilson and Ellen Page. Page’s character is an underage girl who is lured in by Wilson’s alleged pedophile, only to reveal herself as a possibly unhinged self-made vigilante; the rest of the film plays out as a series of power games that calls into question audience assumptions about who is the predator and who is the prey. Both movies have a cast in the single digits (not counting phone voices) and exist solely to play with expectations, but Hard Candy had something that Wolves does not: female characters.

Wolves may be a five star viewing experience, but its subtextual erasure of the horrifying implications and realities of its own premise severely detracts from the film’s recommendability as well as its relevance and canonization as a work of art. “If you want to see this premise done right, watch Hard Candy” is the wrong lesson to take from this review, although that statement is mostly accurate. Wolves is a legitimately good movie, it’s simply that its lack of self-awareness of the way in which it articulates its thesis weakens the movie’s overall statements and concepts.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond