The Woman
★★
(2011)
Lucky McKee’s cult beginnings grew from his debut feature May, a quiet but firm look at insecurity and depravity in one closeted young woman. It’s wonderfully smart, funny and even touching in parts, using cinemas perception of stereotypical female roles in horror film as fodder for analogy and ultimately debate. His new film The Woman, which spurned walk outs, injuries and a very funny ranting tube clip featuring one Captain Indignant when it debuted last year at Sundance, expands on the barrage of torture porn which we’ve all become accustomed to in one way or another and attempts to subvert a genre by unevenly using the genre itself.
McKee and co writer and novelist Jack Ketchum are mostly concerned with the Cleek family, focusing on their father Chris (Sean Bridgers). A man who has a high paying, high powered job, a man who loves his guns, his farm and his camouflage and a man who has his quiet family on a very short leash indeed. His vacant and near mute wife Belle (Angela Bettis), his withdrawn teenage daughter Peggy (Lauren Ashley Carter) and his naive youngest girl Darlin’ (Shyla Molhusen) are especially kept under a close watch while his only boy Brian (Zach Rand) is allowed a slightly longer leash. When the immediately despicable Chris finds a feral woman (Pollyanna McIntosh) living in the wilderness on a hunting trip he traps her and brings her home so that he and his family can chain her up in the basement and “civilise” her.
As has been endlessly debated over already, The Woman does present a necessary parable of the abuse of women both in life and on film but by using the actions which so rightly offend it ridiculously forgets about much of the consequence of the horror of torment. As with the horrendously bad A Serbian Film McKee makes a major error in presenting us not with a powerful script or a intelligent and multi sided metaphor but revels instead in violence, sexual abuse and animal cruelty to let us know how horrible all three of them are. Sure he gets his point across in a sledgehammer fashion but is this not a case of flogging a dead horse with a smaller dead horse?
For better or worse there is something about The Woman that does strike home. The cast do remarkably well and build a tense portrait of a family completely controlled by a horrible father. Sadly, it just isn’t enough to bring it all together and the remaining feeling is that this is a film which is, admirably I’m sure, attempting to bring down the misogyny inherent in modern horror but ends up somehow adding to it.
A wasted effort on a subject which is in desperate need of debate and rectification.
