When Will We?

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She Will is a creepy art house film from a couple years back.  Sometimes cited as a #MeToo film, it was directed and co-written by Charlotte Colbert and it follows an aging child actress recovering from traumatic surgery.  Veronica Ghent has decided to go to Scotland, to a remote retreat, to heal.  She takes her nurse with her and is chagrined to find that the retreat she booked is being shared by an art therapy retreat.  She insists on private accommodations and is put up in an even more remote cabin.  While there, it’s made abundantly clear that this was a place where witches were burnt and their ashes mingled with the soil and the very earth therefore has healing properties.  Veronica gains an ability to exact revenge from her dreams.

The target for Veronica’s revenge is a famous director who seduced her as a child while working on her first starring role.  Famous and powerful, nobody was able to touch him.  With her new-found abilities Veronica is able to exact justice through supernatural means.  Not only that, but when a local man—the retreat’s handyman—tries to rape her nurse, Veronica is able to prevent that too.  This is a moody, sad film that addresses issues that are all too real for many women in a system designed by and intended to profit men.  Either unaware of, or uncaring about women’s experiences as participants in the system, they dismiss their trauma in a way they wouldn’t for other men.  

Although the film doesn’t have tons of action and doesn’t rely on jump startles, it is an effective gothic horror movie.  The Scottish scenery is bleak and evocative and the message is important.  Horror films directed by women are starting to gain some notice.  Those familiar with Suspiria, however, will note the influence of executive producer Dario Argento.  That film also featured the difficulties women can face, and it also concerns witchcraft.  She Will is more mature in these areas, however.  Female directors—and writers—know the unique struggles women have in a society that refuses to give female leadership a chance.  It’s a simplistic world where men are in charge (because the church says so, or, more brutally, because physical strength can be used to get one’s way) and aren’t willing to consider that half the world sees things in a different way.  Movies like this force us to take the perspective of another.  And for that the world is better.

Sighs

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Suspiria is a movie intentionally difficult to follow.  The original 1977 version was an Italian film about witches posing as dance instructors.  After watching it, I felt I didn’t have enough backstory to understand the action.  Then a remake was released last year and I felt I needed, like a dancer, to try again.  I have to confess I’m not a dancer.  Luca Guadagnino’s remake left me scratching my head again, although it underscored a point I make in Holy Horror: in horror films with remakes the role of the Bible changes.  Now, it’s been years since I’ve seen the first Suspiria, but I don’t recall the Bible appearing.  It does, however, in the 2018 remake.  The protagonist, Susie Bannion, is an American enrolled at a German dance school.  She is, in the remake, a Mennonite from Ohio.

Not only does this situation allow religion to take once again an important role in a horror film, it is also the opportunity to show the Bible visually.  Susie’s mother, who objects to her daughter engaging in such a showy profession as dancing (and given the performance of Volk in the film, the nature of this objection can be easily guessed), is dying as the film begins.  Her Mennonite community watches and prays over her, sitting with Bibles clutched in their hands.  To take a page from Holy Horror, this suggests that the Good Book is powerless to save.  While the movie itself is a little confusing on this point, it seems that Susie’s mother dies as her daughter becomes the head witch of the dance academy.  Since Holy Writ famously contains verses condemning witches, the impotence of Scripture is underscored.

Italian folklore about witches appears to be remarkably robust.  From Strega Nona to Suspiria, the wizened women of society have power against which men are powerless.  Some of the bleakest moments in the film (from the point of view of the male gaze) are when the witches taunt powerless, naked men who cannot in any way defend themselves.  Turnabout, of course, is fair play—at least if folk sayings have any validity.  Here it’s worth considering that if male religions hold females down—the Mennonite women are shown in bonnets and uncomfortable clothes—then being a witch is remarkably freeing.  Indeed, there is the energy of a life-force evident in the dancing of the young women and the academy is closed to men, apart from public performances.  I’m still scratching my head over Suspiria, but it seems that the direct engagement with religion and the power of women makes this a movie worthy of rewatching and attempting to understand.