The Woman

The Woman starts out as a cheap-looking horror C-movie. But give it a chance. The lazy acting, strange dialogue and peculiar direction gradually begin to make sense, the characters start to shape up, the atmosphere begins to be suffocating and then the climax takes your breath away. It’s a B-movie, but refined in content, accurate and unusually daring for an American production, both in its brutality and in undermining American social patterns. (24.06.2015)

The excited lad in Sundance hyped it more than it would be advisable. I will have to let it lager in my head for a bit, but it’s hard not to feel disappointed. Right now, I have trouble comprehending The Woman at a symbolical level, all I can say is that it’s been long since a movie character pissed me off so much as the mother in this film. The more action packed ending was rather disappointing, the dad leaves, complicating the situation in a pretty illogical fashion (that this resulted in a nice bloody carnage is another thing). I bet this will have the same mixed reception as McKee’s previous film, May. (01.06.2011)

To bury such a beautifully anti-chauvinist theme with such lethargic and perhaps universally flawed direction is a feat. For example, if you listen at the door during a screening, you can't help but feel that you’re watching not a film, but a cut from a 60s dance school reunion, as the film drops one oldies song after another, which fits like whipped cream on chili con carne. The encounter with the eponymous woman takes place in slow motion, where the girl dapperly dons a leather jacket (?), and it practically looks exactly the same, even with the background music, as when Bay introduces us to Megan Fox. There are more of those points of contact – the wild lady here may have her armpits bare enough to take supporting roles in Wilkinson commercials, but the film doesn't bother to introduce us to the doe who's been chewing her pits clean. The editing between scenes is practically constantly resolved by intercutting, which imho is also a pretty passé thing to do, and almost no one in this movie can act. The highlight is the absolutely incomprehensible pair of teachers, who not only both look about 17, but their importance in the film is minimal and they completely take away from the plot with their problems. Actor Sean Bridgers, an unspoken parody of Colin Firth, does everything he can to make you not take the film seriously, and the final stage is the violence, which isn't there. Or rather, it wants to be, but just as it's happening, someone moves the camera so we can imagine everything... like in the new Seagal movies. What's left? The great story, the strong finale, and especially the absolutely fabulous scene of the marital squabble, which in the current context is the best I've seen in a long time. (18.02.2012)