Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete shares DNA with Kelly Reichardt’s westerns (e.g. Wendy and Lucy): both filmmakers are making modern westerns that deromanticize tired western tropes. This is an excerpt from our ebook on Lean on Pete. We will soon publish an ebook on the works of Kelly Reichardt.
[Read more…] about Modern westerns: Andrew Haigh and Kelly Reichardt are deromanticizing the westGenre Films
Explore films that leverage — and problematize — the definitions of a given genre, from horror films to the Western.
Katharine Isabelle in American Mary (Great horror performances #5)
Rosie McCaffrey discusses why Katharine Isabelle’s performance in American Mary is one of her favourites by an actress in a horror film. Explore our coverage of Women in Horror Month here. Discover our book about feminist horror here.
The Soska sisters wrote American Mary, their 2012 body horror revenge movie, with Katharine Isabelle in mind. It’s perfect casting, subverting the expectations set up by her cult-favourite turn as the demented and bloodthirsty Ginger in Ginger Snaps (2000); in American Mary, Isabelle navigates her character’s struggles with cool, aloof restraint.
In American Mary, Isabelle tracks the thrilling revenge arc of a woman, Mary Mason, coming undone as she rises up against her assaulter. Mary Mason is a promising but financially insecure med student who reluctantly begins moonlighting as a back-alley surgeon. Seen as too soft by her instructors, she feigns emotional detachment and ruthlessness in order to impress them. Her ambitions are shattered, however, when her professor invites her to a party where he drugs and rapes her. Traumatised and humiliated, she drops out of school, adopts the impersonal ruthlessness so hallowed by the surgeons, and exacts revenge by using her professor as practice for her new career in body modification. Soon, her reputation precedes her, but her pursuit of vengeance erodes all vulnerability until she and her icy exterior are indivisible.
At the start of the film, Mary is eager to show her instructors she has what it takes to be an excellent surgeon In order to succeed in the sociopathic, male-dominated world of med school, she must appear to act without empathy. While appearing cold-hearted on the surface, Isabelle reveals flashes of the feelings that Mary is keeping in check. Small moments of hesitation and awkwardness reveal how Mary feels required to compromise herself. When she is instructed to break the news to a family that their father is dead, having just told them he was alive, Isabelle communicates Mary’s unease in a split-second startled expression before she composes herself and does as she’s told. When the surgeons make distasteful jokes about getting to cut up bodies for a living, Isabelle’s ingratiating, nervous laugh is a sign of Mary’s discomfort as she tries desperately to fit in.
We see the real, empathetic Mary when she performs a clandestine surgery away from the leering eyes and condescension of the surgeons at school: the patient’s pain touches Mary and breaks down her unemotional exterior, so Isabelle touches him gently and carefully. “Shhh, it’s going to be okay,” Mary murmurs softly so only he can hear. At home, she cries in the shower, deeply affected by the incident.
After Mary’s assault, she is merciless and vengeful, no longer willing to compromise for the men around her — but tragically, the trauma of the event brings her closer to the sociopathic monster they wanted her to be in the first place. In a wide shot reminiscent of a blood-soaked Carrie White exiting the burning gym hall, Mary enters her apartment and sidles over to her coffee table, upending it in anger. The walk Isabelle chooses is peculiar: in high heels, her hips swing alluringly, but her gait is also jolty and disjointed, like a marionette doll with tangled strings. It could be the walk of someone in shock, but it could also be the walk of a predator. The next day, when she abducts her rapist, Dr. Grant, to begin her bloody revenge, she’s remarkably calm. Her eyes are deadened and she never seems present in the moment. Her voice is soft and singsong, lilting between playful and deadpan. Her movements are slow and languid, even as she tells Dr. Grant, in gruesome detail, all the things she’s about to do to him.
Mary’s revenge is not frenzied but calculated; she calmly and methodically uses Dr. Grant for surgical practice, her impersonal treatment of his body an icy match for his savage violation of hers. Isabelle plays out the aftermath of Mary’s trauma as though she’s in shock, can’t engage directly with her turmoil, and wants to protect herself from further damage. It’s no longer a performance for anyone else, but one to keep herself safe and guarded.
Having struggled against the hindrance of her own natural empathy in the clinical setting of med school, Mary is now only able to connect with her emotions through feelings of anger and violence. When a cop discovers the mutilated body of Dr. Grant, she beats him to death. Here is yet another man invading her space, this time the space where she was privately coming to terms with her trauma. Her movements are powerful and propulsive as she repeatedly brings the weapon down on the cop long after he’s dead. Because Isabelle keeps Mary so sedate, considered, and detached through most of her post-assault scenes, when Mary gives into violence, it feels hugely cathartic, as if all the feelings that have been suppressed are now exploding in a bout of ferocious energy.
Mary achieves the clinical detachment the surgeons encouraged, but it cost her something soft and human. In the penultimate scene, she asks strip-club owner Billy (who has a misguided romantic interest in her), “Do you think I’m crazy?”. Her face barely shifts from its default composure and detachment, but the effect of this minute change is huge. Eyebrows slightly knit and eyes unfocused, for a moment, she seems connected to what is inside her, and she’s troubled by it. When Billy invites her on a getaway trip to LA, her eyes roll around the bar, looking anywhere but at him. Initially, she seems sassy and disinterested, but the wet gleam in Isabelle’s eyes suggests the painful realisation that she can’t change; she’s gone too far to accept the intimacy he’s offering. Getting up to leave, she looks at Billy fondly, but the ice is back when she sing-songs, “I’ll think about it”.
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Beyond empowertainment: Feminist horror and the struggle for female agency
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Review: Blood on Her Name thrillingly grapples with cycles of violence
Matthew Pope’s Blood on Her Name is a steely, psychological thriller about cycles of violence. Now available in cinemas and on VOD in the US.
Matthew Pope’s Blood on Her Name opens on a grown woman staring in fright at a puddle of blood pooling toward her feet. Leigh Tiller (Bethany Anne Lind), a mother and business owner, stands frozen before the body of a man she later claims to have accidentally killed, a look of terror on her face. A later nightmarish flashback echoes this opening scene: a little girl, whom we now assume is the younger Leigh, listens outside a door to the violent grunts of her corrupt cop father (Will Patton). After the sounds of struggle cease with a loud thud, blood slowly seeps under the doorframe, and the girl looks on, calmly enough that we know she’s witnessed similar scenes before. This scene tells us things about Leigh’s violent childhood that retroactively inform the film’s opening: when the older Leigh looks in terror at the man she has murdered, it’s not just terror at having murdered a man, but terror at the fact that she’s becoming her father, a man she always resented for being violent.
In this steely, unforgiving, psychological thriller, there is no easy way out of a life of crime: either you turn yourself in and face the consequences of your actions, or you kill until there’s nobody left to turn you in. Over the course of a few days, Pope charts the increasingly rash decisions Leigh makes when she finds herself stuck between these two distressing options. Like a deer in headlights, she’s startled and unsure where to turn, stuck in a state of perpetual indecision. Her first instinct after the murder is to row the body out to the middle of a lake and dump it into the water’s depths — but she only gets as far as sinking the murder weapon, a spanner, before she doubts herself and turns back. Feeling guilty, she instead leaves the dead man’s body in his girlfriend’s garage, so that the girlfriend can have closure. Throughout the film, she makes several slip-ups because she’s too panicked to think things through: she leaves incriminating evidence at various crime scenes and admitting her guilt to people in the vain and misguided hope that they’ll take pity on her.
Pope and co-screenwriter Don M. Thompson explore cycles of violence as Leigh attempts to halt the history of violence in her family for the sake of herself and her teenage son, Ryan (Jared Ivers). Her ex-husband is in jail; her father is corrupt; and in one of the first scenes of the film, Leigh takes Ryan to meet his parole officer after Ryan blinded a kid in one eye. She’s determined to assert to the officer that he’s a good kid, insisting it in an almost panicked way, and we see that goodness in him too. But the violence of his father (and grandfather) has made Ryan violent, too — his instinct is to react to conflict with violence, like when he attacked the other kid because he was making fun of the fact that Ryan’s father is in jail.
Pope, Thompson, and lead actress Lind work together to create a visceral portrait of paranoia and anxiety that draws tension from its exploration of cycles of violence. Leigh’s violence is a product of the patriarchal violence she grew up under: her father is gun crazy and instills in her a kill or be killed attitude. As an amoral cop, he taught Leigh to operate above the law; while it’s an attitude she rails against (she hates her father and tells him so), and is determined to steer her son away from, she still ends up falling victim to it. What’s more, much of Leigh’s violent behaviour in the film is a result of her carrying on her ex-husband’s corrupt business, which she relies on to support her family. Lind’s face is constantly pinched and pained, her voice faraway with worry when she’s trying to go about her day as normal. “I keep thinking I hear sirens,” she confides to a friend, and you can see it in her face. She’s jittery and hyper-self-conscious; we watch her pace around and search the faces of everyone she talks to intently, scanning despairingly for signs of suspicion. Pope doesn’t need to do much more than linger on her face to ramp up the film’s tension and sense of urgency.
The film also hints that America’s lax gun control contributes to Leigh’s inability to escape from a violent world. She is reluctant to let her son, Ryan, spend time alone with his grandfather, because she’s afraid that he will encourage her son’s inclination toward violence. When she finds her fears confirmed — her father has taken Ryan to practice shooting — she’s furious. Leigh spends the film trying (and often failing) to keep her son away from bad influences, in order to break the cycle of violence, and those bad influences often come in the form of firearms. In the Southern backwoods town where the film is set, there’s even a billboard present in the background of one scene that screams the words: “GUNS. HUNTING. FISHING.” It’s hard for Leigh to stay hopeful that her family can escape violence when everyone and everything around her seem to be pushing her toward pulling a trigger.
Blood on Her Name is now available in cinemas and on VOD in the US.
Beyond empowertainment: Feminist horror and the struggle for female agency
Read our book about modern feminist horror, which contains 20+ chapters on films such as Thelma, Raw, and Perfect Blue.
Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper (Great horror performances #4)
In this excerpt from her essay on Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper, which features in our feminist horror ebook Beyond Empowertainment, Joseph Earp discusses the way Stewart’s artificial, artfully rendered oddness reveals something naturalism could not. Explore our coverage of Women in Horror Month here.
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Kristen Stewart is being watched. The 26-year-old is floating through an empty house: nothing else moves but her, and Stewart exudes a kind of frenzied, studied calm as she passes through the space. She knows she is being observed yet never acknowledges it directly. Her head dips, her gaze flinches. “Awkward” is the wrong word; she’s too deliberate for that, too controlled. “Agonised” is the wrong word, too: her studied, darting physicality sometimes seems pained but not painful. Instead, her movement bypasses language, speaking of nothing but itself.
That energy doesn’t let up when she rests, either. Leaning against a railing, cigarette poked between her lips, surveying an ever-so-slightly sad autumnal landscape, she is a cupped flame, flickering back and forth restlessly. The camera hangs back, still staring, keeping Stewart in a wide shot. And Stewart shifts away from it, throwing a literal cold shoulder. The cigarette moves back and forth from her lips. Her neck creaks and bucks. Her head bobs. Kristen Stewart is never still — even when she is still.
So it goes in the first scene of Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper, a ghost story that stands as Stewart’s most impressive performance yet. The film actively requires her: its plot implicitly invokes a supernatural sort of voyeurism, a kind of watched weirdness that Stewart has mastered over the course of a career as both an indie darling and a Hollywood heartthrob.
Personal Shopper focuses on Stewart’s Maureen, the eponymous shopper who begins to believe that her phone is being haunted by the spirit of her departed brother. In many ways then, the film is less about haunting as it is about those haunted. Much of the storytelling work is done by Stewart, as she shuffles around the edges of the screen, wandering through space like the very “ghost” she communicates with. As ever, Assayas plays his cards very close to his chest: is Maureen going mad? Is she merely grieving? Assayas seems unwilling to answer, and as a result, Stewart’s job as an actress requires a sort of queasy flitting between knowledge and ignorance.
Stewart never plays Maureen’s “breakdown” (if it could even be called that — Stewart and Assayas seem just as willing for it to be interpreted as a breakthrough) as hyperbolic, and she avoids the sweeping gestures that define the work of many celebrated Hollywood titans. Yet every one of Stewart’s actions seems to have a secret, subliminal meaning, from the studied, near-comical looks of boredom she shoots her employer and colleagues, to the beatific, wide-eyed gaze she directs at a phone seemingly being filled with text messages sent from the dead.
Want to read the rest of the book? Order a copy of our new ebook on feminist horror beyond empowertainment here.
Want to read the rest of the book?
This is an excerpt from the book Beyond Empowertainment: Feminist Horror and the Struggle for Female Agency.
The book contains 20+ chapters on films such as Thelma, Raw, and Perfect Blue.
Lupita Nyong’o in Us (Great horror performances #3)
Orla Smith discusses why Lupita Nyong’o’s performance in Us is one of her favourites by an actress in a horror film. Explore our coverage of Women in Horror Month here. Discover our book about feminist horror here.
As a happy family drives up to the beach in Us (2019), director Jordan Peele’s camera stays locked on the face of Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), staring out of the car window with a look of growing fear and anxiety. No amount of bright sunshine, happy chatter, or upbeat music blaring from the radio can distract from the magnetism of Nyong’o’s expression. She closes her eyes, breathing in and cricking her neck to the side as if preparing for battle. She forces a faint smile onto her face to keep up appearances, but it flickers on and off like a faulty light switch.
Later, when recounting a traumatic childhood memory that took place on that very beach — as a young girl, she glimpsed her own terrifying doppelganger in a fairground hall of mirrors — we only see Nyong’o’s back as she speaks. And yet, her tense stance and the fear in her voice instantly turns the attention away from Adelaide’s husband’s (Winston Duke) antics and transforms a comedic scene into a breathlessly tense one. Her voice quivers as she speaks, sentences ending in terse, frightened, upward inflections; her body shakes as she gesticulates, and her fingers look painfully stretched out and seized up. Nyong’o is surely in large part responsible for the nail-biting tension of Us; her evocation of fear is so visceral that it reaches out and envelops the viewer, too.
Nyong’o’s performance(s) in Us is the epitome of range: she plays two characters who represent opposing sides of American life and the human psyche. Adelaide is a well-off mother-of-two vacationing with her family in Santa Cruz; Red is her identical “shadow” who lives in squalor underground, playing out a nightmare copycat of Adelaide’s life. As Red laments in a hoarse rasp, “When the girl [Adelaide] ate, her food was given to her warm and tasty. But when the shadow was hungry, she had to eat rabbit, raw and bloody. On Christmas, the girl received wonderful toys. But the shadow’s toys were so sharp and cold, they sliced through her fingers when she tried to play with them.” While their bodies and minds are clones, a horrific upbringing has transformed Red into Adelaide’s monstrous id.
As Red, Nyong’o creates one of modern horror’s greatest monsters. Red may look like Adelaide, but the way she moves is more spiderlike than human, setting this performance deep in the uncanny valley. It’s a performance of quick and jerky movements: Red stands eerily still, but when she decides to move, she does so suddenly and at lightning pace. Her voice is so cracked and hoarse as to sound almost ghostly, and certainly supernatural, even though Red is a human being. This contrast between the human and the uncanny is what makes Red’s presence so terrifying.
But Nyong’o’s performance as Red is all the more impressive when contrasted with Adelaide — especially when Nyong’o’s two characters share the frame together and couldn’t seem more different from one another. Adelaide, while a seemingly more “normal” role — and certainly one closer to Nyong’o’s actual self (in that she’s not a murderous psychopath) — is deceptively complex. Nyong’o’s performance deepens on a second viewing, when the viewer is watching her with knowledge of the film’s twist: as children, Adelaide and Red switched places, meaning that Adelaide was secretly born into Red’s life of squalor before managing to escape it. Her nervousness in the car ride up to the beach might not simply be the anxiety of a woman faced with the source of unexplained trauma, but the anxiety of a woman who’s always felt like she didn’t belong, who is afraid of being found out. Adelaide begins to look a lot more like a woman with a secret. That Nyong’o is able to delicately balance all these possible interpretations of Adelaide is a credit to the nuance with which she reveals this guarded character’s interior life.
Us gave Nyong’o her first showcase role, allowing her to explore the horrific depths and multifaceted nature of the human consciousness. This complex leading role came after years of being mistreated and ignored by Hollywood, a fate all too common for dark-skinned black women in American cinema (it’s no coincidence that Peele, a black man, gave Nyong’o her first lead role). Nyong’o earned the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for playing Patsey in 12 Years a Slave, her first role in a feature film. And yet, it was three years before Nyong’o was given another live action role, despite her incredible beauty and presence. Us is a blistering fuck you to everyone who overlooked her in the past decade, a cramming in of what should have been seven years of complex leading roles into a two-hour movie. It’s a promise of all the great things that should be to come for Lupita Nyong’o.
Explore our coverage of Women in Horror Month >>
Beyond empowertainment: Feminist horror and the struggle for female agency
Read our book about modern feminist horror, which contains 20+ chapters on films such as Thelma, Raw, and Perfect Blue.
Claire Foy in Unsane (Great horror performances #2)
In this excerpt from her essay on Claire Foy’s career, which features in our feminist horror ebook Beyond Empowertainment, Alex Heeney discusses the many masks of Claire Foy in Unsane. Explore our coverage of Women in Horror Month here.
In almost every frame of Unsane, Claire Foy’s character must don and shed masks against her own inclinations. At first, it’s to avoid rocking the boat at her job and fly under-the-radar in her life — and she’s got it down to an art. When Soderbergh introduces Foy’s character, Sawyer Valentini, he’s careful to show her as a chameleon: taking on different roles in different situations, always with the aim of avoiding trouble. On the phone at work, she’s terse, dismissive, and borderline rude while dealing with a difficult client — Sawyer is arrogant about her abilities and feels no need to hide it. When she FaceTimes with her mother, her fake smiles and forced upbeat tone clash with her nervous, quick eating, and the way she keeps scanning her surroundings.
Playing all these parts is exhausting. With her leering boss, she maintains as much physical distance as possible, stiffening her body both out of stress and to appear closed off, providing no opportunity to be misinterpreted. When he compliments her, she briefly relaxes her shoulders, but her forced smile and sideways glance tells us she’s still on guard; she’s worried something is coming next. When it does, her face doesn’t fall so much as go blank and still for the first time, disappointed but not surprised. Her jaw tightens. Pausing for a few seconds, she finds a way to leave as quickly as possible.
Listen to our podcast episode about gaslighting in Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane and Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man
It’s not until she speaks to a counsellor at the Highland Creek medical facility about her stalking that she lets her guard down at all, slouches in her chair, her voice finally cracking with barely held-back tears. Shot in a closeup, Foy’s face registers Sawyer’s uncertainty and fear: her face is never still, twitching, her head moving jerkily, like she’s already afraid of herself because she knows there’s no stalker there. But we also see her determination, never allowing herself to wallow for too long — she’s too smart, and she needs the counsellor to know she fully understands her situation. Of course, this one time she lets her guard down is when she’s taken advantage of, and gets held against her will in the psychiatric hospital.
Once inside the psychiatric hospital, the rules have changed, and Sawyer is constantly testing different tactics to try to navigate this hostile system. Sawyer is literally imprisoned by patriarchal forces. At first, she can’t even believe what’s happening to her, and tries to control the situation through bluster, but even that mask slips as she complies, bit by bit. When taken into an examination room, she holds her ground by staying close to the door, looking around her for support or solutions, her breathing laboured. But she does what she’s told, constantly asking if that means she can now go, hopeful things will course correct. When she whispers, “But there’s nothing wrong with me,” there’s uncertainty in her voice: the confident Sawyer we know would proclaim it, if she were fully certain. She follows the nurse down the halls, but eventually stops, hoping that if she can stop the trajectory deeper into the hospital with her movements, she can stop what’s happening to her.
When reasoning with the nurse doesn’t work, she tries an alternate tactic: stepping close to the nurse, angling her head down to the nurse’s height, Sawyer suddenly speaks in a sugar-sweet, quiet voice, a smile plastered on her face, kindly asking for a phone call. But as soon as she gets what she wants, that sweet girl mask drops. Standing at the counter by the phone, she contorts herself into a powerful posture, taking up more space. She calls the cops, speaks clearly and firmly — not too quickly, to avoid sounding panicked — taunting the nurse with her eyes as though she knows she’s won.
Once she knows her stalker, David (Joshua Leonard), is in the hospital and real, she’s emboldened, even as she’s still terrified — Foy’s trademark duality. She yells at David, stretches her arm out to point at him and declare to all who can see that he’s a liar. And yet even as she does so, she’s backed against the wall, shaken. When she talks to the doctor about what’s happened, armed with the knowledge that she’s right, she no longer tries to placate him, as in their first meeting, just as she had the nurse. This time, she’s direct and precise, assuming the doctor will be on her side, only to discover she’s completely alone.
With no semblance of control left in her life, Sawyer finds it even more taxing to play into feminine stereotypes of compliance and docility in order to manipulate those with power over her. Indeed, the deeper she gets in, the less she bothers to don masks. Sometimes, that’s a comfort, when she talks with fellow patient Nate (Jay Pharaoh), and we see her first genuine smiles. Sometimes, it means she just reacts on instinct, violently and without thinking. But even when she gives an inch, she never fully loses her abrasive and arrogant self, either by mumbling nasty one-liners or darkly joking. The one time she does restrain herself, before attacking the patient she hates most, Violet (Juno Temple), we see her thinking it through, trying not to be taken in by Violet’s taunts, before deciding it isn’t worth it not to react — behaving well won’t help her inside the hospital the way it did outside.
Eventually, Sawyer transforms from a reactive victim to someone merely playing possum. When she finds herself in solitary confinement with David, at first, she drops all the masks. She’s scared, seated in the corner, her arms around her knees, trying to take up as little space as possible. Every time David approaches, she rushes away to the opposite corner. She’s on the verge of tears, shaking just a little, and yet she still speaks clearly and forcefully, telling him she hates him. It’s only once she starts screaming and banging at the door, trying to summon help to no avail, that she takes a few moments to collect herself — head lowered, back against the wall. When she raises her head, she’s transformed into a fighter, but it’s so subtle that David can’t see it. He can’t differentiate between the genuine Sawyer from a moment ago, nearly overwhelmed with despair, and the newly emboldened one who has donned a mask to manipulate him. Suddenly, she’s taunting David, pushing herself into her predator’s space. She has a plan, and she’s ready to use it.
Throughout Unsane, Foy shows us how Sawyer cycles through tactics to try and get what she wants: now stern and scary, barking orders, standing up straight and taking no prisoners; now pleading and ingratiating; resorting to violence in a moment of threat; and finally, pretending to give up with a simper on her face while her body tenses. She tells David she’s complying, but her body and voice tell a different story: she’s wrestling back control. It’s only by putting a mask back on and adapting to the situation that she can find her power.
Explore our coverage of Women in Horror Month >>
Want to read the rest of the book? Order a copy of our new ebook on feminist horror beyond empowertainment here.
Want to read the rest of the book?
This is an excerpt from the book Beyond Empowertainment: Feminist Horror and the Struggle for Female Agency.
The book contains 20+ chapters on films such as Thelma, Raw, and Perfect Blue.