Strange Darling (2023)
October 8, 2024 8:12 AM - Subscribe
A twisted one-night stand spirals into a serial killer's vicious murder spree.
Starring Willa Fitzgerald, Kyle Gallner, Barbara Hershey, Ed Begley Jr., Jason Patric.
Written and directed by JT Mollner. Written by JT Mollner. Produced by Bill Block, Steve Schneider, Roy Lee, Giovanni Ribisi for Miramax/Spooky Pictures.
Cinematography by Giovanni Ribisi (really). Edited by Christopher Robin Bell. Music by Craig DeLeon.
95% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.
Now available for digital rental in the US. JustWatch listing.
Starring Willa Fitzgerald, Kyle Gallner, Barbara Hershey, Ed Begley Jr., Jason Patric.
Written and directed by JT Mollner. Written by JT Mollner. Produced by Bill Block, Steve Schneider, Roy Lee, Giovanni Ribisi for Miramax/Spooky Pictures.
Cinematography by Giovanni Ribisi (really). Edited by Christopher Robin Bell. Music by Craig DeLeon.
95% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.
Now available for digital rental in the US. JustWatch listing.
Okay, now to discussing the actual movie.
The "Shot entirely on 35mm film" title before the movie, the nonlinear setup, the titled chapters, the TCM-inspired "This is a true story" narration at the open, and the huge twists... these are all very "Look at me! I am a clever and exciting filmmaker!" shit.
The thing is... Mollner kind of is, so he gets away with that.
While the movie definitelyraises some real issues toys around provocatively with some real issues, I am not convinced it necessarily has anything specific to actually say about those issues. This is a talented filmmaker fucking with you just for the game of it. Given how upsetting some of the violence in the sex scene plays out as (until context is added anyway), it's entirely fair if you hate this kind of fucking around. I thought it was kind of a ride.
One of the rarest things in horror is when a movie actually feels unsafe. This has that.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:30 AM on October 8
The "Shot entirely on 35mm film" title before the movie, the nonlinear setup, the titled chapters, the TCM-inspired "This is a true story" narration at the open, and the huge twists... these are all very "Look at me! I am a clever and exciting filmmaker!" shit.
The thing is... Mollner kind of is, so he gets away with that.
While the movie definitely
One of the rarest things in horror is when a movie actually feels unsafe. This has that.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:30 AM on October 8
Yeah, this was surprisingly engaging. I called the "what" of the spoiler/twist fairly early on but not the "how/why" (my first guess was some kind of demon possession, ha.) Watching it unfold to see how right/wrong my guesses were was a lot of fun. It took a good, long time to resolve clearly and was often awfully weird getting there.
Definitely a movie that plays with its audience, mostly in good ways, though I agree, I almost noped out during the seemingly nonconsensual bondage scene and almost again when the tables were turned. It was A Lot sometimes, yet I was left feeling pleasantly...I can't quite say "entertained", so I'll go back to "engaged."
posted by kittensyay at 6:09 PM on October 8 [3 favorites]
Definitely a movie that plays with its audience, mostly in good ways, though I agree, I almost noped out during the seemingly nonconsensual bondage scene and almost again when the tables were turned. It was A Lot sometimes, yet I was left feeling pleasantly...I can't quite say "entertained", so I'll go back to "engaged."
posted by kittensyay at 6:09 PM on October 8 [3 favorites]
I also got the main twist pretty early and also found that one scene pretty hard to watch. Overall I thought this was good but I'm also not sure I thought it had much to say. The protagonist was magnetic and the acting was good, the temporal structure was a little show-offy but it worked well, and even the ending worked. I feel like I should have liked this more than I did.
posted by whir at 9:40 PM on October 8 [1 favorite]
posted by whir at 9:40 PM on October 8 [1 favorite]
Sooooo disappointed in this one. I think it's not particularly clever, and not particularly well shot in terms of meaningful compositions and camera movement. It does use bold colors, but not particularly well, and the images are like, in focus and stuff so that's nice.
This one feels like a zero trick movie to me. The re-arranged timeline is only used to hide information from the viewer and delay the revelation. It serves no other thematic or character-related purpose. The intertitles are trite but think they are smart. Ugh so bad.
The root "idea" (if you can even call it that) of the plot, and many details of its execution, are tuned to culture war discourse. If the director is not an extremely online person who is active on redpill and conservative internet spaces, I'll eat my hat.
The movie is an extended, and quite dumb, version of the old "riddle" about how on earth the surgeon could have been the accident victim's parent when the father died in the car crash.
Early on, the movie has the female lead talk explicitly about how women have to be afraid of violence when hooking up with random men, as well as disappointing sexual encounters. She also talks extensively about consent.
Then, BAM! The twists happen. SHE is the violent danger, HE is the victim. SHE is the one living out some weird, one-sided sex ritual while HE is the one who has an extended and disappointing sexual encounter. HE is a Good Boy who respects her safe word and doesn't want to do drugs. SHE is the vile danger who doses him with drugs without his consent.
You see, what he's doing here is taking our cultural discourse around sexual violence and danger and then he does something that he thinks is super clever: he inverts it, and then calls it a day.
Towards the end of the movie, an older Latino dude sheriff and a young, baby-faced orange-haired lady sheriff with nearly translucent skin who looks like she may actually be 12 years old get into a heated argument about what to do with the female lead and the dead male lead.
The older, more experienced LEO dude is cool-headed and pragmatic. He wants to determine what happened and not presume the woman is the victim.
The well meaning but deluded and inexperienced young person assumes the main lady antagonist is a victim, assumes she was defending herself, and pressures the older male sheriff into doing what he knows is wrong by 1) wrongly citing policy and 2) asserting that if he didn't go along with her, he would be liable if the woman later sued.
They literally argue about all of this with stilted dialog and poor direction in a way that feels like a didactic scene from a weird Christian movie.
This one scene criticizes female solidarity, mocks the concerns of young workers, lionizes gruff no-nonsense experience over dumb ideals that turn out to be wrong and harmful, and paints lawsuits related to LEO overreach or failure to act appropriately as the primary reason the male LEO does the wrong thing and ultimately gets killed for it.
Also, since I hadn't mentioned it before, the evil main lady has deliberately pulled her pants down to visually suggest she was sexually assaulted before LEO arrived. In other words, this scene also involves credulous belief of a fake rape allegation made by an evil woman.
This movie strongly believes in cops, and that the police should be a boys' club. The villain of the movie repeatedly kills many people explicitly because those people are trying to call the police. The one "bad" LEO we see is a woman who is somehow both a baby and a Karen all at once.
This movie then has a woman who appears to be of indigenous ancestry use a concealed carry weapon to defensively shoot the main antagonist, ending the movie. I firmly believe the director thought something very close to, "libtards love the natives, they're going to eat this up" while writing the ending.
The main male lead, a random dude in the hotel, and this final plot mechanism dressed up like a woman at the end of the movie are all unambiguously shown to be correct in their decision to carry firearms.
In the eyes of this movie, every woman who winds up slaughtered by the main woman antagonist might have been able to save themselves if they were armed. The first woman to be killed in the movie chronologically speaking is a hotel clerk. That woman is literally is asked if she has a gun first, and she says she doesn't. She explains all of this just before getting stabbed in the neck. If only she carried, she might still be alive.
The best part of the movie was the Pinto, because Pintos are beautiful cars.
posted by Number Used Once at 1:27 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]
This one feels like a zero trick movie to me. The re-arranged timeline is only used to hide information from the viewer and delay the revelation. It serves no other thematic or character-related purpose. The intertitles are trite but think they are smart. Ugh so bad.
The root "idea" (if you can even call it that) of the plot, and many details of its execution, are tuned to culture war discourse. If the director is not an extremely online person who is active on redpill and conservative internet spaces, I'll eat my hat.
The movie is an extended, and quite dumb, version of the old "riddle" about how on earth the surgeon could have been the accident victim's parent when the father died in the car crash.
Early on, the movie has the female lead talk explicitly about how women have to be afraid of violence when hooking up with random men, as well as disappointing sexual encounters. She also talks extensively about consent.
Then, BAM! The twists happen. SHE is the violent danger, HE is the victim. SHE is the one living out some weird, one-sided sex ritual while HE is the one who has an extended and disappointing sexual encounter. HE is a Good Boy who respects her safe word and doesn't want to do drugs. SHE is the vile danger who doses him with drugs without his consent.
You see, what he's doing here is taking our cultural discourse around sexual violence and danger and then he does something that he thinks is super clever: he inverts it, and then calls it a day.
Towards the end of the movie, an older Latino dude sheriff and a young, baby-faced orange-haired lady sheriff with nearly translucent skin who looks like she may actually be 12 years old get into a heated argument about what to do with the female lead and the dead male lead.
The older, more experienced LEO dude is cool-headed and pragmatic. He wants to determine what happened and not presume the woman is the victim.
The well meaning but deluded and inexperienced young person assumes the main lady antagonist is a victim, assumes she was defending herself, and pressures the older male sheriff into doing what he knows is wrong by 1) wrongly citing policy and 2) asserting that if he didn't go along with her, he would be liable if the woman later sued.
They literally argue about all of this with stilted dialog and poor direction in a way that feels like a didactic scene from a weird Christian movie.
This one scene criticizes female solidarity, mocks the concerns of young workers, lionizes gruff no-nonsense experience over dumb ideals that turn out to be wrong and harmful, and paints lawsuits related to LEO overreach or failure to act appropriately as the primary reason the male LEO does the wrong thing and ultimately gets killed for it.
Also, since I hadn't mentioned it before, the evil main lady has deliberately pulled her pants down to visually suggest she was sexually assaulted before LEO arrived. In other words, this scene also involves credulous belief of a fake rape allegation made by an evil woman.
This movie strongly believes in cops, and that the police should be a boys' club. The villain of the movie repeatedly kills many people explicitly because those people are trying to call the police. The one "bad" LEO we see is a woman who is somehow both a baby and a Karen all at once.
This movie then has a woman who appears to be of indigenous ancestry use a concealed carry weapon to defensively shoot the main antagonist, ending the movie. I firmly believe the director thought something very close to, "libtards love the natives, they're going to eat this up" while writing the ending.
The main male lead, a random dude in the hotel, and this final plot mechanism dressed up like a woman at the end of the movie are all unambiguously shown to be correct in their decision to carry firearms.
In the eyes of this movie, every woman who winds up slaughtered by the main woman antagonist might have been able to save themselves if they were armed. The first woman to be killed in the movie chronologically speaking is a hotel clerk. That woman is literally is asked if she has a gun first, and she says she doesn't. She explains all of this just before getting stabbed in the neck. If only she carried, she might still be alive.
The best part of the movie was the Pinto, because Pintos are beautiful cars.
posted by Number Used Once at 1:27 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]
That really feels like a lot of work to force a political ethos onto a movie that didn't seem to spend much time on anything beyond yanking the viewer's chain, tbh.
Just to pick one thing, the movie set up that the "demon" guy is a married guy looking to cheat on his wife with some cheap sex. He doesn't call anything in, because he's too selfish to risk his reputation and his chance for revenge. It's hard for me to think they meant him to be a good guy.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 3:24 PM on October 18 [2 favorites]
Just to pick one thing, the movie set up that the "demon" guy is a married guy looking to cheat on his wife with some cheap sex. He doesn't call anything in, because he's too selfish to risk his reputation and his chance for revenge. It's hard for me to think they meant him to be a good guy.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 3:24 PM on October 18 [2 favorites]
That really feels like a lot of work to force a political ethos onto a movie that didn't seem to spend much time on anything beyond yanking the viewer's chain, tbh.The text of the story is weird in a lot of ways that absolutely do communicate culture war garbage, and they do so intentionally.
It might seem like chain-yanking because the movie is pushing something in opposition to mainstream liberal and feminist views. Mainstream liberals are really fun to upset and a fair target, but it gets weird when this narrow set of views are the *only* chain the movie yanks.
The movie's most basic premise is to show a woman play out various feminist criticisms of rape culture and patriarchy but reversed.
Troma movies actually yank the viewer's chain, and they tend to do so for lots of different kinds of "yous." This movie has an extremely gross and narrow set of points it wants to make, against a very specific set of targets.
No incel watching this movie has had their chain yanked.
I could be wrong, but I genuinely think I'm seeing something present in the text of the movie that was put there deliberately by its creator.
posted by Number Used Once at 4:49 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]
I could be wrong, too. But I don't think the story is about anything other than being too comfortable in our assumptions. I think it played with progressive assumptions because it was made for a progressive audience and if the mistaken assumptions hadn't been tailored to us, it wouldn't have worked.
The demon/cop, who is not coded as kind of progressive, is wrong in his assumptions, and it gets him killed. I also think the movie has way too much fun with the female killer to think it's any kind of sexist judgment against women. The Electric Lady at the end, also does, because she assumes an older woman offering help is a helpless mark.
I could be wrong though, as could the feminist film critics whose recommendations got me to watch this. As could critical consensus in general. I wouldn't say it's never happened. People had reasons why they thought Bone Tomahawk wasn't racist and regressive and then that director's next few movies pretty well clarified that it had been.
So I guess we'll have to see what this filmmaker does next.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:36 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]
The demon/cop, who is not coded as kind of progressive, is wrong in his assumptions, and it gets him killed. I also think the movie has way too much fun with the female killer to think it's any kind of sexist judgment against women. The Electric Lady at the end, also does, because she assumes an older woman offering help is a helpless mark.
I could be wrong though, as could the feminist film critics whose recommendations got me to watch this. As could critical consensus in general. I wouldn't say it's never happened. People had reasons why they thought Bone Tomahawk wasn't racist and regressive and then that director's next few movies pretty well clarified that it had been.
So I guess we'll have to see what this filmmaker does next.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:36 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]
To be clear though, I'm not arguing that this is a great and morally sound film that would never do something so base. I'm arguing this has all of the thematic depth of a guy on a motorcycle popping a wheelie. It's just stylistic fucking around. Piling all of that on it feels like using a house of cards as a foundation. Though now I'm mixing metaphors. Eh well.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:43 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:43 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]
No incel watching this movie has had their chain yanked.
How does woman outsmarts/overpowers overmatched man rank on the incel expectations/enthusiasms scale, would you say?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:18 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
How does woman outsmarts/overpowers overmatched man rank on the incel expectations/enthusiasms scale, would you say?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:18 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
I like talking about movies, so I'll keep going since it seems like you want to keep going. But if it stops being fun for either of us I'm happy to stop whenever! Also, I really appreciate what you do in fanfare, get excited to see what you post, and generally respect what you think about movies.
But I do have a different perspective here.
My way of stating a similar idea would be to say, this guy is pulling some edgelord shit. In either case, we're not too far apart. Perhaps the main difference in our takes is you think he's not messing with conservatives, incels, and men's rights people because they're not part of his audience. I think he's not messing with them because he's deliberately put together a story agreeable to their worldview.
I'd also like to point out this is a "woman kidnapped by serial killer" movie, in the horror genre, with a hard R rating. You're not getting an audience consisting exclusively of elevated horror A24 fans when you put something like this together. I'd be surprised if he actually thought the major demographic watching it would be hi-brow liberal feminists.
Famous quote time. Truffaut once said something like, "There’s no such thing as an anti-war film." The rough idea being that by showing the violence of war, some portion of the audience will actually be attracted to that violence. You cannot show war even in a messy way without accidentally glorifying that same violence.
A similar or related idea is that the best satire is almost (or entirely) indistinguishable from what it is satirizing, which can also be dangerous. Metafilter is fond of saying things like, scratch an ironic racist joke, and what comes off is the irony, not the racism.
To be even less fancy about where I'm coming from, and to keep us grounded in genre thinking, one of my favorite bits in Game of Thrones has Arya deliberately re-assessing a situation when some guards come to mess her and Syrio up:
So like, I think the best thing to do here is to look with our eyes.
This movie begins with a woman being hunted like an animal. She is already wounded and acts terrified of the man hunting her. These visuals are catnip for incels and mysoginists.
A major and extended segment of the timeline has the electric lady running around in her bra and panties. This is not some weird subversion of the male gaze, it just is the male gaze. She's shown to be blood-thirsty, crazy, and hot. More catnip.
A significant part of the sexy times shown in the hotel room consist of her character being physically assaulted. Later we learn this is with consent -- but those scenes were shown to us initially without that context. Even once that context is added, her being tied up, slapped around, and beaten remains catnip for incels.
We see her body progressively more and more damaged throughout the movie, as she is graphically assaulted over and over again. The primary person causing this pain is a man who she attempted to harm, meting out what could be considered by some to be justice.
Catnip.
The damage she takes throughout the movie is particularly interesting, btw, given genre norms! In this movie, the female lead steadily becomes slower, weaker, and more desperate as her body becomes more and more damaged. This is usually what happens to the final girl or the surviving victim in this sort of film. Usually it is the killer who operates at 100% for most of the movie. The reason for this is simple. It heightens the tension to have the "good" character worn down over time, while the killer's relentless assault continues unabated.
Here, this tension is simply not present. The "killer" is a wounded, terrified woman. Ultimately, there is no final girl. The core structural component that redeems this sort of movie and provides space for a feminist interpretation has been removed.
These inversions could be fruitful and interesting, btw. I'm not opposed to playing with genre tropes, I love it when movies do so. But my read on this film is that these inversions are facile and shitty, not clever and fun.
Anyway, I'm almost done.
One of the electric lady's primary tools is, like Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate, being underestimated by others. To put it in a deliberately polarizing manner, she "plays the woman card" throughout the movie in order to better harm and manipulate others. This too is catnip for incels.
The last thing I'd like to point out is that every single woman in the movie is either viciously murdered or is a fool (or both), with two exceptions. One exception is the nurse in the hotel office who is shown to be correct to "not want to get involved" when a half-naked, terrified woman covered in blood rushes into the office. The other exception is the woman at the end who is on screen for like, less than five minutes, and shoots the Electric Lady in self defence.
Contrast that with how the movie lionizes the male LEO, who is shown to be correct in every assessment he makes about the crime scene etc. Maybe the male lead is a hero, maybe he's not, but I don't think there's much doubt the male LEO speaks with the voice of the movie maker when he turns to the woman cop and says, "You dumb bitch."
That is his assessment of the woman cop, and as far as I can tell, the movie un-ironically and uncomplicatedly wants us to share that assessment with him.
So I do stand by my read that this movie is deeply simpatico with men's rights advocates and incels, and not by accident.
posted by Number Used Once at 2:07 PM on October 19
But I do have a different perspective here.
I think it played with progressive assumptions because it was made for a progressive audience and if the mistaken assumptions hadn't been tailored to us, it wouldn't have worked.This is a generous way to put it, but note that even with your presentation of things, the movie has been custom-made to mess with a progressive feminist audience. (You didn't say feminist but I'm tossing that in there. Let me know if you disagree. Highlighting the difference because I don't want to put too many words in your mouth or straw man your opinion.)
My way of stating a similar idea would be to say, this guy is pulling some edgelord shit. In either case, we're not too far apart. Perhaps the main difference in our takes is you think he's not messing with conservatives, incels, and men's rights people because they're not part of his audience. I think he's not messing with them because he's deliberately put together a story agreeable to their worldview.
I'd also like to point out this is a "woman kidnapped by serial killer" movie, in the horror genre, with a hard R rating. You're not getting an audience consisting exclusively of elevated horror A24 fans when you put something like this together. I'd be surprised if he actually thought the major demographic watching it would be hi-brow liberal feminists.
How does woman outsmarts/overpowers overmatched man rank on the incel expectations/enthusiasms scale, would you say?I think you're seeing what you want to see here. Not trying to be insulting, just trying to point out a forest / trees situation, or that there is a small blind spot.
Famous quote time. Truffaut once said something like, "There’s no such thing as an anti-war film." The rough idea being that by showing the violence of war, some portion of the audience will actually be attracted to that violence. You cannot show war even in a messy way without accidentally glorifying that same violence.
A similar or related idea is that the best satire is almost (or entirely) indistinguishable from what it is satirizing, which can also be dangerous. Metafilter is fond of saying things like, scratch an ironic racist joke, and what comes off is the irony, not the racism.
To be even less fancy about where I'm coming from, and to keep us grounded in genre thinking, one of my favorite bits in Game of Thrones has Arya deliberately re-assessing a situation when some guards come to mess her and Syrio up:
Look with your eyes, he had said. She saw: the knight in his pale armor head to foot, legs, throat, and hands sheathed in metal, eyes hidden behind his high white helm, and in his hand cruel steel. Against that: Syrio, in a leather vest, with a wooden sword in his hand.And she realizes that even though her heart wants to stay and fight, once she looked with her eyes it became obvious they couldn't win.
So like, I think the best thing to do here is to look with our eyes.
This movie begins with a woman being hunted like an animal. She is already wounded and acts terrified of the man hunting her. These visuals are catnip for incels and mysoginists.
A major and extended segment of the timeline has the electric lady running around in her bra and panties. This is not some weird subversion of the male gaze, it just is the male gaze. She's shown to be blood-thirsty, crazy, and hot. More catnip.
A significant part of the sexy times shown in the hotel room consist of her character being physically assaulted. Later we learn this is with consent -- but those scenes were shown to us initially without that context. Even once that context is added, her being tied up, slapped around, and beaten remains catnip for incels.
We see her body progressively more and more damaged throughout the movie, as she is graphically assaulted over and over again. The primary person causing this pain is a man who she attempted to harm, meting out what could be considered by some to be justice.
Catnip.
The damage she takes throughout the movie is particularly interesting, btw, given genre norms! In this movie, the female lead steadily becomes slower, weaker, and more desperate as her body becomes more and more damaged. This is usually what happens to the final girl or the surviving victim in this sort of film. Usually it is the killer who operates at 100% for most of the movie. The reason for this is simple. It heightens the tension to have the "good" character worn down over time, while the killer's relentless assault continues unabated.
Here, this tension is simply not present. The "killer" is a wounded, terrified woman. Ultimately, there is no final girl. The core structural component that redeems this sort of movie and provides space for a feminist interpretation has been removed.
These inversions could be fruitful and interesting, btw. I'm not opposed to playing with genre tropes, I love it when movies do so. But my read on this film is that these inversions are facile and shitty, not clever and fun.
Anyway, I'm almost done.
One of the electric lady's primary tools is, like Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate, being underestimated by others. To put it in a deliberately polarizing manner, she "plays the woman card" throughout the movie in order to better harm and manipulate others. This too is catnip for incels.
The last thing I'd like to point out is that every single woman in the movie is either viciously murdered or is a fool (or both), with two exceptions. One exception is the nurse in the hotel office who is shown to be correct to "not want to get involved" when a half-naked, terrified woman covered in blood rushes into the office. The other exception is the woman at the end who is on screen for like, less than five minutes, and shoots the Electric Lady in self defence.
Contrast that with how the movie lionizes the male LEO, who is shown to be correct in every assessment he makes about the crime scene etc. Maybe the male lead is a hero, maybe he's not, but I don't think there's much doubt the male LEO speaks with the voice of the movie maker when he turns to the woman cop and says, "You dumb bitch."
That is his assessment of the woman cop, and as far as I can tell, the movie un-ironically and uncomplicatedly wants us to share that assessment with him.
So I do stand by my read that this movie is deeply simpatico with men's rights advocates and incels, and not by accident.
posted by Number Used Once at 2:07 PM on October 19
I watched this as part of a watch party. Interestingly myself and two other women immediately suspected that the serial killer was the woman.
I think you're seeing what you want to see here.
Not to be rude, but I think you might want to meditate on that a bit as it seems to me like you're projecting a lot onto this film. I don't at all agree with most of your assessment of the film, but I do not have the energy or the desire to go through a point by point refutation. But I will say condemning a film because it has imagery that incels may enjoy is far too reductive to be in any way useful.
posted by miss-lapin at 7:31 PM on October 19 [1 favorite]
I think you're seeing what you want to see here.
Not to be rude, but I think you might want to meditate on that a bit as it seems to me like you're projecting a lot onto this film. I don't at all agree with most of your assessment of the film, but I do not have the energy or the desire to go through a point by point refutation. But I will say condemning a film because it has imagery that incels may enjoy is far too reductive to be in any way useful.
posted by miss-lapin at 7:31 PM on October 19 [1 favorite]
I think we're gonna have to agree to disagree, as I think the point of the film--to the extent that it bothers to have one--is that insisting on reading micro/individual situations with a macro-level worldview is a terrible idea. The idea of trying to force a macro level worldview onto that feels fundamentally silly to me.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:54 PM on October 19 [1 favorite]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:54 PM on October 19 [1 favorite]
But I will say condemning a film because it has imagery that incels may enjoy is far too reductive to be in any way useful.I think you're misstating or misunderstanding my actual analysis. I provided an overview of how the film could be attractive to incels because DirtyOldTown asserted the movie was antithetical or upsetting to incels, which I disagree with.
To concisely state my read, the text of the movie is fundamentally mysoginist and anti-woman, and the film intentionally and pervasively communicates a conservative and reactionary bundle of culture war discourse ideas and talking points.
Like, the movie explicitly shows every time a woman is harmed. On the other hand, every single physical harm a man experiences (the male lead's torture and chest carving; the actual murder of the mountain man; the shooting of the male cop) happens off screen, with the one exception of the male lead's death. The movie is extremely down to showing women being harmed and women committing harm, but is entirely disinterested in doing the same for men.
It is straightforward to extract a feminist reading from every other movie in the "woman hunted / trapped / kidnapped by a serial killer" genre, and films in related genres like I Spit On Your Grave and Audition and so on. I'd love to read a serious critical analysis of this movie that tried to assert a feminist reading, because I think it would be genuinely difficult to do so.
I could easily be wrong with my read of the director, but my analysis of the film is consistent and based on what is actually present in the film. Even if you disagree with me or prefer an alternate analysis, I don't think you can claim my reading is incoherent and unsupported by the text.
I think the point of the film--to the extent that it bothers to have one--is that insisting on reading micro/individual situations with a macro-level worldview is a terrible idea. The idea of trying to force a macro level worldview onto that feels fundamentally silly to me.
And yet it only makes that macro/micro point to undermine present-day discourse about things like believing women and criticizing cops for not providing timely medical assistance to people they have arrested. That's not a coincidence, those are deliberate choices.
I think we're gonna have to agree to disagree
Yeah, I think so. I had fun talking about it, though, and appreciate your pushback and your perspective on the film. I hope it's been fun and at least mildly interesting to disagree with me, and I remain curious and open to other perspectives on the film.
posted by Number Used Once at 10:25 AM on October 20
You're missing that I pretty clearly stated I wasn't interested in a lengthy discussion. You have a lot to say about this movie, but another format that's more inviting to long form posts would be a better choice as every comment being a multiple paragraph essay in this format really feels more like being lectured to about how I just don't get it rather than having a fun conversation about a movie that I watched. I'm leaving this conversation so please don't address me further.
posted by miss-lapin at 11:05 AM on October 20
posted by miss-lapin at 11:05 AM on October 20
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First thing to know: the less you know going in, the better this works. I didn't even link a trailer for this reason. People say this about a lot of movies, but this is at the very high end of how true that can really be. Better to go in blind. Completely blind.
However, that said if you are a person who appreciates trigger warnings read to the next section.
Still here? Okay. There is not just violence here, but sexual violence, even in the form of scary, nonconsensual brutality against a woman that is hard to take. This said, if you know me from MeFi, I hope you know I am not a creep. Even if you don't, consider that MeFi is about as low-creep a zone as generally exists online. I wouldn't recommend this if it were gross violation of women.
So... if the above stuff seems super fucked-up and you really need to know specifically why anyone would recommend this, given that kind of content... at just about the moment that a normal person would be thinking about turning this off for good, it is then revealed that the "nonconsensual" part is role play. And not only is this troubling stuff a game, it's a game the woman insisted upon and charted out herself.
And why does this make sense in the context of the movie? Super duper spoiler inbound, to the extent that I will even use the stupid tag:
Spoiler
The lady is the serial killer, not the guy.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:24 AM on October 8 [3 favorites]