2011, USA
Lucky McKee’s The Woman, based on a story he wrote with author Jack Ketchum as a spin-off to Ketchum’s Offspring/Off-Season feral family characters was one of the most uncomfortable viewing experiences l’d had in a while.
A young woman raised by wolves lives deep in the American wilderness, trapping and hunting her food in pre-verbal isolation.
Meanwhile, in a small leave-it-to-beaver town nearby, we are introduced to the all-American family at a neighbourhood BBQ – Chris Cleek (Sean Bridgers), the charming and successful law clerk, his unconfrontational Betty Crockeresque wife (Angela Bettis), their angsty, reticent teenage daughter (Lauren Ashley Carter), the adolescent son who worships his father (Zach Rand), the gleefully unmannered three-year-old girl.
But this superficial vision of ‘the people next door’ will be shaken when dad comes home after a hunting trip to reveal his latest trophy: The Woman – who he chains up in the cellar in order to initiate a torturous program of ‘civilization.’
He brings the family down to the cellar to show them the new ‘surprise’ and none of them reacts with the appropriate horror.
Instead, he gives them all little jobs to do, to help him turn this wild beast into a proper woman, and they obey him without protest (the son with more sadistic enthusiasm than the others).
The teenage daughter’s feelings about what is happening manifest in physical illness, despondency, faltering grades, anxiety.
The wife’s rebellion is all in her eyes.
Angela Bettis says so much with so little, just through the story she tells through her face: a story of lifelong systematic abuse, and complicity in that abuse.
Conversely, the woman in the cellar is a growling beast seething with the rage of centuries.
It would seem that the film’s title refers to the feral character trapped and chained up by the husband – but in fact it extends to the entire gender, the role of ‘the woman’, in the home, and in society.
The feral character is a mirror held up to these staid roles.
Like the unsocialized youngest daughter who is reprimanded at the film’s opening party for kissing all the little boys, the feral woman is the untamed outlaw.
She is loudly imprisoned, screeching and pulling at her chains, but the other women are imprisoned by their own fear and silence.
The abuse turns graphic in the last act, and while the film’s first audience at Sundance was subject to fainting spells and outraged rants that were captured on video, the upsetting thing about the film isn’t the violence against women (which is abundant, both physically and verbally), but the complicity of the female characters in that violence.
The women watch each other being abused, they exchange code-like glances that plead for action, but none does a thing to help the other thoroughly upsetting and loaded film that expounds upon the microcosmic view of unhealth gender dynamics explored in McKee’s earlier film May.
hexafu 