Women Talking (2023) - Movie Review

[tw: sexual assault]

In Manitoba Colony, a Mennonite settlement in Bolivia, at least 151 women and children were raped over the course of four-or-so years. An anaesthetic normally reserved for livestock was sprayed in through their windows, knocking everyone inside the houses unconscious. At first, the men of the village attributed the ‘mysterious’ incidents to demonic attacks or possibly being done by Satan himself; in common parlance, once the event broke through the isolated nature of the village and its inhabitants, one name attributed to it was the ‘ghost rapes of Bolivia’.

While this film, and the novel on which it was based, is set with the backdrop of this atrocity, they primarily serve as a dramatic addendum to it. Described on-screen as an “act of female imagination” (a phrase also used to describe the assault itself when the women came forward about a more terrestrial culprit than Christianity's favourite strawman), the story depicts an impromptu council of women from this settlement, who meet up and try to come to a consensus about what they do next. Do they do nothing? Do they stay and fight? Or do they leave?

Unsane (2018) - Movie Review

 

There’s a specific type of discomfort that comes out of watching a film like this. It’s the discomfort in knowing when someone is actually telling the truth but everyone else insists that they’re not. The feeling that makes you want to put your hands through the screen into the film’s reality and just start yelling that this person is right, that things are happening to them, or at the very least give assurance that they’re aren’t as crazy as everyone wants that person to believe.

The Girl In The Spider's Web (2018) - Movie Review

Ever sit down for a test, only to realise that you somehow missed two-thirds of the study material you needed to pass it? That’s what watching this film feels like. The story is all over the place on its own merits, tantalising a battle of wits between reigning badass cyber punk Lisbeth Salander (played with a continually-wavering accent by Claire Foy) and her twin sister Camilla (played adequately by Sylvia Hoeks), only we never quite get that. What we do get is a slurry of spy shenanigans, cat-and-mouse games winding around each other, and enough missed opportunities to make one slam their head against a wall in frustration.

Breathe (2017) - Movie Review

The plot: Tea broker Robin Cavendish (Andrew Garfield), after being stricken by polio and rendered paralysed from the neck down, has been given only three months left to live. However, between his wife Diana’s (Claire Foy) words of encouragement and his own resolve, he plans on being around for a bit longer than that. As he adjusts to his new living conditions, his friends and family all chip in to help him out, starting a movement that would lead Robin Cavendish to become one of the most famous advocates for the disabled in history.