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The Woman (DVD)
Year: 2011
Rating: R
Director: Lucky McKee
Cast: Angela Bettis, Sean Bridgers, Pollyanna McIntosh
Release Date: August 18, 2011
Distributor: Monster Pictures
The Film: 4.5
The Disc: Zero
FILMINK rates DVDs and Blu-rays out of 5“...provocative and uncompromising...”
Reminiscent in some respects of Todd Solondz's Happiness, The Woman is an offbeat horror film with an unusual attention to relationship dynamics and characterisation. Its primary narrative, and the one that produces the most horror, concerns the capture and attempted ‘
‘civilisation' of a wild woodland woman by family man and pillar of the community Chris Cleek. An engrossing journey into a horrific alternate reality, The Woman is above all a study in domestic violence and the dehumanisation that attends such abuse.
Director Lucky McKee elicits fantastic performances from his cast. Pollyanna McIntosh is compellingly feral as the Woman; Angela Bettis and Lauren Ashley Carter in the roles of Cleek's wife and daughter are studies in cravenness, rarely raising their voices above an undertone. As Chris Cleek, the man who hides his violence under a veneer of cheery normality, Sean Bridgers perfectly embodies the banality of evil. Towards the end, horror - previously in service to the narrative - overpowers an insightful depiction of the knife-edge balance between public respectability and private brutality.
Overall, however, The Woman is provocative and uncompromising, bringing to light more than one kind of savagery.
