Felt (2014)

October 17, 2016 3:28 PM

A woman creates an alter ego in hopes of overcoming the trauma inflicted by men in her life.

Felt is streaming on Netflix, and there are multiple digital rental options as well.

Strange Club note: next month's movie will be Cemetery of Splendor, the latest film from Apichatpong Weerasethakul. We saw his Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives last year. It's recently been made available for streaming on Netflix.

posted by naju (4 comments total)

I just finished watching a couple of hours ago, and I'm still processing. I'm going to hang back for a bit and collect my full thoughts to share later, but here's a few random ones to start us off:

Lead actor Amy Everson's website and Twitter feed really shed a lot of light on the film. It would appear that the line between Everson and her "character" (all of the soft sculptures in the film are Everson's own creations) is extremely blurry indeed, which makes the last 15 minutes of Felt even more disturbing in multiple ways.

Meta-thought: I've had Felt in my Netflix queue ever since it first appeared on the service late last year. It ended up on my radar because of a glowing Fantastic Fest review that I'd read on the Birth.Movies.Death film blog.

Ironically, the review was written by film critic (and self-styled male feminist) Devin Faraci, who stepped down as editor-in-chief at B.M.D just last week after it was learned that he had sexually assaulted a woman several years ago.

Even more ironically, Faraci's misdeeds were only brought to light when his victim directly confronted him on Twitter, in response to Faraci criticizing Donald Trump's "grab 'em by the p___y" comments caught on videotape 11 years earlier. So in short, watching this particular movie feels extremely appropriate right now, when all sorts of rape-culture chickens are finally coming home to roost.
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:43 PM on October 17, 2016 [4 favorites]

I need to watch it again. When I saw it, it was shilled as a straight up horror film so I was not at all prepared for what I watched. Still, I was really intrigued by the movie and its treatment of the subject matter which, aside from the final scene, felt to me very real. Part of that is the movie involves multiple traumas as opposed to simply one. We see how those various traumas build on each other weighing down the protagonist in a totally believable way.

It reminded me of the Stendahl Syndrome in terms of its exploration of a female protagonist working through trauma and how that changes her interactions with those around her.
posted by miss-lapin at 11:21 PM on October 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

This also threw me for a loop, as I was expecting more of a horror movie and maybe even something like a dark comedy (there are elements of both in there, but deployed to a very different effect than I expected.) The lead character was so convincingly established and portrayed by Amy Everson that she really felt like someone I could know, and I related to her misanthropic reclusive tendencies a bit. And that just made it all the more harrowing to watch. I was pretty uncomfortable throughout, and I thought the film kept doing something really interesting - it would have been easy to show all the men in the film as boorish assholes, but throughout much of the film I felt like the women were doing something which crossed the line of violative and needlessly cruel to strangers who were presented as not really that deserving of it. I'm actually not quite sure what the politics of this film end up being, or if it subscribes to any simple stance. I think it's mostly interested in complicating and rooting through our (or just my?) expectations on rape culture, victim/perpetrator, and the effects of trauma. I'd love to read interviews with Jason Banker and Amy Everson to find out what that collaboration looked like, what their intent was, etc.

Overall - it made me feel not great, and I'm still mulling it over. I really liked it!
posted by naju at 12:59 PM on October 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

It ended up on my radar because of a glowing Fantastic Fest review that I'd read on the Birth.Movies.Death film blog. Ironically, the review was written by film critic (and self-styled male feminist) Devin Faraci, who stepped down as editor-in-chief at B.M.D just last week after it was learned that he had sexually assaulted a woman several years ago.

Aagh. Jesus. This is a hell of a review to read.
posted by naju at 1:10 PM on October 19, 2016