Really wanted to see this when it came out, kept arranging with my sister to go, but we kept missing it. So delighted to get another chance to see it.
Alice Krige gives the lifeblood performance of this film as Veronica Ghent, an aging actress recovering from breast cancer surgery, who seeks solace in a Highland retreat. Unfortunately she is greeted by a shower of self-improvement enthusiasts who are all characters from a different genre of movie. She is in a feminist psychological folk horror, they are in a twee teatime comedy. You imagine them back home saying, “We went on one of them retreats, didn’t we Linda? The man who ran it was a right character!” Meanwhile Krige is drenched in blood having her third eye opened.
Initially aghast at having to share this very vulnerable and painful time with fools, Veronica eventually comes to believe she is being healed by the soil surrounding the retreat, nourished as it is on the ashes of all the women burnt as witches centuries before. Their pain mingles with her pain, their rage mingles with her rage, and she hopes to make a common cause in avenging injustice.
Because as Veronica withers and fades from public view, as she keeps her mastectomy a secret, and struggles even to recognise herself in the mirror, the director who made her his pet project at 13, who launched her career and raped her, that bastard is getting a knighthood. No fading from the limelight for him, no concerns about his aging or the longevity of his career. Still hailed as a genius, he’s going to be making a sequel to that first film of hers, and he’s auditioning so many young girls to find his new star.
In visions, Veronica sees a woman, an accused witch, bound and bloody, tarred and gagged with a scold’s bridle. And Veronica, here at what she considers the end of her career, the end of her womanhood, potentially even at the end of her life, she still can’t say what was done to her.
So that’s the plot, how was the film as a whole? Eh. Alice Krige is amazing, and if not for her performance, this film would struggle. Kota Eberhardt gives a strong showing as Desi, Ghent’s carer, and their relationship is the most resonant one in the film. In fact, at first I was a little irritated by interruption of all the flashes of visions and memories, because I felt it broke the flow of their back-and-forth, cut into the time need to establish their relationship and anchor the story in the real world. The film as a whole though I felt needed to be trimmer, tighter, that it could have just done with another going over in the edit.
And while this is a feminist horror, it is very much a white feminist horror. From the first scenes of this rich white woman snapping at the working class woman of colour employed as her servant, I was like, eeee. Please don’t let this be another film about how a rich white woman reveals that her life is in fact not perfect, to elicit the sympathy and support of other women, about whose lives she shows not a molecule of interest or solidarity. Please don’t let this be a ‘hug the maid’ moment.
Nae luck. That’s exactly what it is. Their relationship, despite it being one of the strongest parts of the film, goes absolutely uninterrogated, with Desi finding fulfillment through her support and growing admiration and affection for Veronica. Veronica even symbolically adopts Desi as her daughter by giving her a family heirloom, in a scene which has no inkling as to how paternalistic it looks. Veronica even criticises Desi’s androgynous appearance, which firstly fuck you, and secondly even if I kinda understand what you think you’re saying about the celebration of the feminine, fuck you.
The gay couple at the retreat are handed the most explicitly misogynistic monologue of the film, despite being a film which features two (hetero) rapists. One half of the couple eyerolls at the notion of patriarchy and when gesturing with his limp wrist has his hand magically set alight. Which, yeah, feels of a piece with the digs at Desi’s androgyny. So yeah, She Will needs to take another look at itself.
So a mixed bag, but still worth a watch in my opinion.