The Woman (Lucky McKee, 2011)

Hey, so I have a new writing gig at Spectrum Culture. I'll be getting screeners every now and then for films that I otherwise wouldn't get to see until well into next year. Naturally, I'm excited. My first review is for Lucky McKee's fantastic, deeply troubling exercise in extreme feminism, The Woman. Dealing with the depravity of patriarchal systems and putting unleashed femininity on display in such a brilliant fashion that I had a complete flight of ego after watching it and assumed McKee made it for people like me who liked Lars von Trier's Antichrist but wanted it stripped of distracting affectations. Barring an awful soundtrack, this is a magnificently crafted film that foregrounds McKee's gift for gradually building overwhelming bewilderment and terror without cheap scares. One of my favorites of an excellent year.

So please take a look at my review of The Woman and leave a comment.

May (Lucky McKee, 2002)

Lucky McKee's May belongs to the small group of horror films as likely to make you cry as scream. Its protagonist rates with the children of Let the Right One In and The Devil's Backbone and any Lon Chaney performance as one of the most unsettling but affecting characters put on the screen. In Catch-22, Joseph Heller adds a splash of sadness to his biting satire when he describes the childhood of unwitting officer Major Major with a grimly funny but painfully real summary: "Because he needed a friend so desperately he never found one." The same sentiment hangs over May, its titular character secluded all her life for her lazy eye, the social alienation carrying into her adulthood where she cannot find pals even after taking steps to correct her condition. By this point, the physical deformation is secondary to her malformed social skills.

But McKee's mise-en-scène reflects May's eye, casting askew glances at synecdochical body parts upon which May fixates. In so doing, the director at once deconstructs the male gaze and creates a new female gaze that is no less disturbing for its fetishistic intensity. For May, the phrase "nobody's perfect" functions not as a comforting call to acceptance of her physical abnormality but a maddening reminder that she can never find the perfect person to offset all her years of loneliness. She knows she'll probably only ever have one friend, so she needs that companion to be perfect.