SHE WILL (August 2021)

   

SHE WILL

(August 2021)

“We must all keep terribly, terribly calm.”

Imperiously curt and dismissive, Veronica Ghent (Alice Krige) is an aging actress who’s recovering from a major medical procedure. Accompanied by her private nurse, Desi (Kota Eberhardt), Veronica is spending some time away from the glaring tabloid scene, at a retreat located in an area in Scotland where “about 3,000” women were once tried for witchcraft (these unfortunates referred to as “the burnt”).

It’s a place where the soil has a “very high proportion of human ashes”, the wind “sounds like whispers”, and it occasionally rains soot, which the locals call “witch feathers”…

“Desi, if you think you’re gonna survive this sh!tstorm called life by doing what’s ‘advisable’, you are seriously mistaken. You have to be all teeth. Claws. Trust me. The bastards will stop at nothing to grind you down.”

As it turns out, Veronica once worked on a film called Navajo Frontier, and was said to have had “a special bond” with the film’s director Eric Hathbourne (Malcolm McDowell).

Please note that she was just 13 years old at the time.

“Imagine that. To be able to love without ghosts in your bed. Look in the mirror. Feel hopeful. Clean the bastards out of you.”

Both Veronica and Desi are haunted, each in their own measure, and the dark territories they find themselves in have much to say about what these women should do with their personal ghosts.

Now, I’ve been a fan of Krige going all the way back to John Irvin’s adaptation of Peter Straub’s* Ghost Story, and she does not disappoint here.

Meanwhile, Eberhardt is a revelation as Desi. It’s a quiet and fiercely intelligent performance that serves to complement Krige’s more cutting and acerbic Veronica.

“Foucault wrote of the male gaze, that the act of seeing is neither transparent nor neutral, but an imposition of power.”

“Millennia of patriarchy dictate how we see.”

Directed by Charlotte Colbert (an impressive feature debut), from a script written by Kitty Percy and Colbert, and with Dario Argento as one of its executive producers, She Will is a potent concoction that signals Colbert as a name to watch for.

Please note the score by Clint Mansell, and the cinematographer/editor(s) combo of Jamie Ramsay and Peter Strickland’s frequent editor, Matyas Fekete**, tag-teaming with Yorgos Lanthimos’ frequent editor, Yorgos Mavropsaridis***.

There is also the presence of Rupert Everett as Arturo Tirador! (I honestly did not recognize Everett and had no idea he was in the film till the end credits roll.)

Oh, and props for the end credits song choice, a Nouvelle Vague cover of a song from 1984…

“Just need the famine, the pestilence. We’ll have our very own apocalypse.”

She Will is a darkly evocative portrait of female rage, the kind that simmers just beneath the surface, silent, as if muffled and restrained by a scold’s bridle, often emerging in sublimated form, simply waiting for something to trigger the catastrophic eruption, and the smothering rain of witch feathers in the aftermath…

“It will torture you.”

* RIP. (Just one of many heart-breaking losses on the creative front we suffered last year.)

** Apparently, the only Strickland feature film Fekete did not edit was Berberian Sound Studio.

*** Mavropsaridis was the editor on Kynodontas, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Dennis Iliadis’ +1.

Parting Shot:

If this kind of narrative speaks to you, then might I humbly suggest an interesting double bill with Elle Callahan’s Witch Hunt.

(She Will OS courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com.)