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The greatest thing ever to happen to Lucky McKee’s The Woman had to be the now-infamous screening at Sundance, where one very upset viewer had to be escorted out of the theater by security after launching into a screaming tirade about the film’s rampant misogyny. Since the incident was captured on cell phone video and posted to YouTube, the film has now garnered a reputation for being controversial and dangerous. But the film I watched struck me as more unsettling and perhaps a bit confusing.
The Woman opens on its unnamed titular character (Pollyanna McIntosh): a grimy, feral woman washing herself in a stream and cleaning a wound on her abdomen. From there, the action shifts to corporate lawyer Chris Cleek (Sean Bridgers) and his clearly not-quite-right family. Wife Belle (Angela Bettis) and teenage daughter Peggy (Lauren Ashley Carter) behave like shell-shocked war veterans, teenage son Brian (Zach Rand) already shows signs of being a budding sociopath, and only littlest daughter Darlin’ (Shyla Molhusen) seems normal.
On a solo hunting trip, Chris spies the Woman in the creek through his hunting scope. After a quick stop at home to get things ready, he traps her and shackles her in his storage center before introducing her to the family as their “project.” While he claims to want to civilize her, it’s pretty clear that there are some distinctly uncivilized currents running through the Cleek family, and the Woman’s presence is only going to make things worse.
Any film that spends over half of its running time with a woman chained up and subjected to abuse is going to run the risk of being exploitative. While McKee wisely avoids visually graphic excess during these sequences, it’s disturbing stuff, and I can understand how it’s prompted walk-outs and strong reactions. At the same time, as the film demonstrates the deep and violent misogyny beneath Chris’s often charming façade, it also charts the breakdown of his fractured family, as Belle begins to crack from the strain and Brian starts to come into his own as a monster.
While the notion that suburban banality can mask horrific behaviors isn’t exactly a revelation, The Woman uses it to create a slow, creeping tension that finally explodes in the film’s manic and quite gory final 20 minutes. Unfortunately, that’s also where it begins to fall apart. The sudden shift from tense dread to full-bore splatter proves jarring, and it includes a twist that seems to make no sense whatsoever—that is, until you learn that this is the third entry in horror author Jack Ketchum’s Dead River series (McKee shares co-author credits with Ketchum on both the novel and the screenplay). While the film ostensibly can stand on its own, both the Woman as a character and the film’s ending benefit greatly from a familiarity with those books.
There’s no denying that The Woman can be a troubling viewing experience, and despite the occasionally slow pacing and lack of clarity, that’s something the genre needs to stay vital. I’d say that McKee has earned better than knee-jerk accusations of exploitation, but I appreciate that those accusations have brought his work to my attention, and I hope to see more from him in the future—with or without the screaming tantrums from the audience.
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