Everyone gels well together, drawing the audience in so the punches hurt all the more. The rest of the performances are strong stuff too, Angela Bettis as the meek wife of the piece, downtrodden to the point of barely having her own personality, Zach Rand as son Brian following in his fathers footsteps and Lauren Ashley Carter as daughter Peggy withdrawing into her own shell from the horror. Pollyanna Mackintosh is wonderfully inhuman in the role, conveying sheer violent animalism through her body language and freakish guttural grunts and growling. It finds perfect match in the woman though, femininity in its most feral savagery. The character is patriarchy at its most terrible extension, dedicated to control and dominance, assured of its utter superiority and quick to cruelty. He gives the character a constant menace, a smile, bright face and charming demeanour, a plastic outside so almost right, so not quite all there that it perfectly suggests his inner depravity, and in his depravity he is just as slick and even darkly humoured. The film is anchored in Sean Bridgers' performance as Chris Cleek, family man gone very, very wrong. From the very start this is unusual stuff, with the titular woman hallucinating birth then slaughtering a wolf for food, and while not especially violent given its reputation some pretty heavy territory gets explored, domestic abuse, familial corruption and a visceral take on gender power conflict. Its an account of an average American family going about their business, except for the fact that the father is a complete monster who one day brings home a feral woman from the woods, who he decides to educate. Funny because The Woman in fact is a long way away from misogyny, in fact I'd almost be inclined to call it a feminist film. Its funny that the first major notice this film got was because somebody stormed out of an early screening crying misogyny.
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