The Woman | Review

The Woman is a violent and profoundly unsettling film, not because of the titular wild woman so much as the husband and father who abuses all of the women in his family and several outside of it. All of which is to say that Lucky McKee’s fourth feature film tries to reverse the dynamic the title suggests and to pose the question of who the real monster is in this nightmarish and slightly unbelievable story, though in asking that question it doesn’t exactly go to great lengths to so much as make believe it is subtle. And that’s because it isn’t.

There are a lot of qualifiers one might hurl at McKee’s second novel adaption/collaboration with co-writer Jack Ketchum (Red). Not exactly scary in the final analysis, and when one goes into it one does not do so in expectation of a shimmering script or even of decent acting—some of which actually redounds to the movie’s favor, since there are two female parts, that of the elder daughter Peg (strong entry by Lauren Ashley Carter) and of the wife (Angela Bettis), which are played just about as well as they might have been, given the context. One goes in expecting a lot of blood.

And so there is a lot of blood. The first minute or so consists of an overwrought sequence of the wild woman (a physically demanding role for the otherwise beaut thesp Pollyanna McIntosh) running about and then falling asleep and something to do with a baby (was she pregnant?) being licked by a wolf. This faux-profundity really doesn’t help plead its case all that well, but thankfully the film gets off to its campy start soon enough. First sequence featuring the Cleek clan sees daughter Peg at a party with the rest of the family, and it is notable that the portrayal of the family begins with her being splashed with water by some boy, called a ‘strumpet’ (apparently that’s still in circulation, though one could not be faulted for thinking that it died out with the reign of Queen Victoria), and turning around to see whether her father had seen her with a horrified look which she maintains throughout the flick, even when it really doesn’t fit the scene. But it’s a strong horrified look, and in many ways it encompasses the audience’s reaction to the family. There are signs that the father is abusive, or at least that something is off, from the very start, both in Peg’s fearful look back and in his wife’s tentative smile.

It turns out he is abusive. And when he finds this wild woman in a conveniently close-by wilderness, he has the family clean out the cellar in order to keep the woman in there. They are all horrified at what he ends up using it for, and only the son (Zach Rand), who is the character that most closely identifies with the father, seems especially happy about it. We later find out that he was full of glee because he was nursing ideas from the start of having sex with the same woman. So, for the record, does the father—as his first encounter with her makes abundantly clear. And that’s another thing—even though the movie is by definition unsubtle, it really doesn’t need the schlocky soundtrack culled from the wrong end of the grunge movement of the nineties. The soundtrack stampedes into the scene like a subtitle when the characters are already speaking English on screen—it assumes, and never rightly, that we won’t somehow know what’s going on, as if this could possibly go over anyone’s head. At any rate, the further we move long in the narrative it becomes clearer who the real monster is — especially in the loaded sequence where Peg’s teacher comes to tell the family that Peg is pregnant and where audiences will think back to the meaning of the scene where father embraces daughter early on and mother looks sternly on. He had also just punched his wife and knocked her out before the teacher arrived, and when the teacher looks in his wife’s direction he tells her she is ‘taking a bit of a power nap.’

Again, this isn’t really surprising. In fact, nothing except for the acting is really surprising, and then only in the case of the pair of mother and daughter, who turn in acting that is leagues beyond what one typically encounters in a horror pic. The resolution isn’t especially remarkable or any more shocking than one expects it to be, which is to say, not at all, given who is cast in the part of the real monster from the start. What is surprising is the extent to which McKee is unafraid of disgusting the audience—from physical amputations to nightmarish domestic violence to a finger-biting-and-eating incident near the beginning. But does it really go beyond the horror shtick? No. Is it especially alarming? Not really, just exceptionally and sometimes aimlessly violent. Can you do worse? It’s possible you could, but you really wouldn’t want to do that much worse—for your sake.

Rating 2 stars