User Reviews

Now those calling this film crap need to stop watching horror or anything remotely symbolic. Stick to your empty calorie action flicks.

This film is a horror movie on the surface, but really a commentary on both masculine vs. feminine and wild vs. civilized.

The men in this film abuse, oppress, subjugate, rape and even murder, the women around them who question their authority. This film is not misogynistic, the male characters are. Look at the end, the husband and son die horrible deaths. The mother, because she was weak and betrayed her own gender by not protecting her daughters from the husband, paid that price with her life. The oldest daughter was saved because she freed The Woman, who represents feminism and strength against male oppression, thereby freeing herself from the shackles of it. The female child is innocent, still untainted and will be raised to be strong.

The next aspect is wild vs. civil. The Woman represents the ancient, uninhibited side of human nature. Dark, unrelenting, unsympathetic to those around her. She kills without remorse, but also to survive. But she does not hide who she is by living a lie. She represents the truth and cruelty of nature.

Chris Cleek represents some of humanity. People who hide behind an exterior of normalcy, education, manners and society. They are just as vicious and cruel as The Woman, but have learned to keep their baser desires in the dark. These people are the serial killers, abusers, rapists and psychopaths of the world. Nature's instincts that could not be tamed. Chris's downfall was his betraying Nature, which is yin/yang, male/female. By violating the women around him, he violated Nature and, The Woman (Nature), paid him in return.

Now, this film does have its flaws. I was not a huge fan of the soundtrack. I would have preferred something more darkly symphonic, but I truly enjoyed this film very few I watch actually have a message to convey. I recommend it for both true horror fans and those who think outside the box.

What the film "The Woman" has going for it is that it's different than your average horror movie. Instead of a family being terrorized by some feral people in the woods (as in Wrong Turn or Hills Have Eyes), a man captures a wild woman and brings her home to his family, keeps her chained up in a cellar in an attempt to civilize her (as in Black Snake Moan), or so he says. We soon learn that all the females in his house are sort of prisoners at the hands of this abusive husband / father and his real intention is to have a girl toy so that he can go out and rape her at night while his wife is sleeping. Even though this implausible story moves along at a snail's pace, it's still pretty interesting simply because it's something different. The film does a good job of really making us hate the evil man, but it peters out in the revenge department, which happens during the last ten minutes, resorting to cheap gore effects. I would have liked to see the man suffer a bit more, would like to have seen the wild woman toy with him or hunt him down instead of killing him so quickly. In fact, I would have liked a different ending altogether, because even though the man is evil and all, he is after all a lawyer and is masterfully meticulous in his psychological and physical torture, so for him all of a sudden to turn into a total madman is out of character. Pollyanna McIntosh is fabulous as the wild woman and the rest of the casting is superb (the kids really look like the product of their parents). Lauren Ashley Carter does a fine job as the depressed, secretly pregnant daughter, and Angela Bettis is convincing as the flinching mother / wife so scared of her husband that she goes along with whatever he does, even something this absurd (although her sudden bout of bravery at the end is unconvincing, but that's the fault of the writing, not the acting). There is a good surprise at the end but unfortunately the timing and mood are off in my opinion, so it isn't nearly as scary as it should be. If you're a horror fan you'll want to check this out, because even if it's flawed it's at least something different and probably the beginning to some great careers.

The first hour is rock solid. Then it becomes too directly a movie about how men are evil and women are oppressed. Also at about the one-hour mark, it loses the subtle parody aspects. There's some brutal horror scenes at the end, but they're exactly what you were expecting from the beginning, and the effects are kind of comical and sloppy. Someone gets thrown in the air and it looks like they go into anti-gravity mode. There's also this sad indie music playing at random points throughout the film; it makes sense in the early scenes, but it feels haphazard towards the end.

I kept typing because I needed 10 lines. This is perfectly in parallel with the film; both my review and the film started out with the right idea and then just kept going until they completely ran out of steam.

The Woman- The movie opens with a seemingly happy family enjoying a backyard BBQ with some friends. But it is apparent very soon that this family has a lot of terrible secrets they are hiding. The wife seems to be walking on eggshells around her husband, the teenage daughter is having trouble at school, and the teenage son is showing signs of being a psychopath like his father. The father may seem like the picture of an upstanding citizen but is actually a wolf in sheep's clothing.

During a hunting trip, the father finds a feral woman. But instead of calling the authorities, he brings her home to live with his family? He decides to make it a family project to clean her up and domesticate her. It is no surprise that things do not go as smoothly as he hoped. What follows is a disturbing gory end to the story.

From a woman's point of view, I saw this film as more of a piece about what is actually civilized and what is feral. The Woman could instinctively tell who was there to harm her or help her. She could easily read other people's emotions and reactions to what was happening to her. During the duration of the film, the father seems to act just as uncivilized as his captive, but displays it in a very different way than The Woman.

The movie was shocking, disgusting, thought provoking, and perverse. Horror fans will be be satisfied and cringing with the splatterfest ending.

I'm undecided on this one. First, let me say that the soundtrack is completely inappropriate, intrusive and distracting. When Cleek first encounters The Woman it should have been a silent and nervous scene, even erotic, but instead we get some whiny and unconnected college rock crap that adds nothing. All the songs in the film suck.

Let's not forget that the premise of this is absurd to the point of hilarity. Look honey, I found this savage woman wandering the woods. Let's keep her and train her to be a proper girl, just like in Pygmalion. Only much worse. OK, so he gets her home and she bites his finger off. His reaction? 'Ouch!' That's it. He yelps for a second then puts a plaster on it. Now, I assume we are expected to surmise from this that he is a psychopath and impervious to pain, like Raymond Lemorne in The Vanishing, but he carries none of the menace and his sleek professional face is just a little too slick. The look on The Woman's face as she crunches his finger is priceless though.

So on to his family, a bunch of one dimensional caricatures lorded over by this smiling psycho, that makes me think that this is an attempt at a dysfunctional family black comedy like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but there's just too much that's set up and obvious. None of the characters are believable and it's impossible to sympathise with them, especially the mother. Her character has a perfectly good chance to put a stop to the disaster she can see coming, but chickens out and actually perpetuates it.

The gore factor of this is negligible, so forget that too. And why does the daughter lie about her brother masturbating when he was torturing The Woman? It makes little sense, especially as she appears to empathise and identify with The Woman, who can apparently sense that she is pregnant. The ending is baffling too. I can see what the storyteller was trying to say: the modern nuclear family doesn't work, so a return to savagery and primitivism is the way to survive, but again, its too trite and obvious an ending and it just sort of fizzles out. The fathers death, a good opportunity for some real payback, is rendered powerless with the clichéd 'tear your heart out and eat it' scene.

There are few saving graces to this film. The soundtrack is awful, the gore is blah, the characters are flat and unbelievable, the misogyny is delivered like a sledgehammer (yeah, men are bastards. we get it) and the moral, such as it is, is typical 'tack and ending on before we run out of money' fodder. Imagine company of Wolves, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and an elongated episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but without the production values and you're about there. The only thing that made this worth watching was Pollyanna McIntosh. She owns the screen and conveyed more drama with a look or a smile than the rest of the cast put together.

I didn't hate this, but I suffered it until the end for Pollyanna. A begrudged 6/10

I came in expecting bad and man was it pretty bad. I had my fair share of disturbing and strange films from all around the world but this one certainly makes one of the top on my list. It's about a lawyer who plays a double life of good guy attorney during the day and sadistic asshole at night. On a hunting trip literally behind his house, he finds a feral woman living in the woods. He captures her and somehow convinces his family into "civilizing" her because it is right thing to do. And what better way to do it than to chain her up in the cellar and sexually abuse her. Oh yeah, it's also kind of hard to believe that this woman spent years in the woods without realizing that there is a whole farm next to cave she lives in. Let's skip a little to the gory scenes which we usually love about the horror movies. So the abused daughter (assumed impregnated by her sick father) frees this woman in an attempt to save her teacher who is being fed to dogs and surprise! Another feral woman being kept in a doghouse. The first feral grabs what looks to be a 2x4 or a rectangular piece of steel and manages to chop the abusive father's son right in half!! Can this get cheesier? Oh yes, it can! She then turns her attention towards the father, plunges her fist into the man's chest, lifts him off the ground, and pulls out what I'm assuming is his heart (even though it's not beating) and eats it while he dies. Sigh. There are all kinds of things wrong that I would love to chat about but if you like, you should check it out for yourself and come back and write a bad review like I am now. The film's director was obviously trying to create something unique and different but it's definitely no "Martyrs". After watching this movie, I felt like I would have been a lot more entertained watching a cheesy Mike Bay film.

What The Woman was trying to get across is beyond me. What begins as a relatively interesting plot, advances very slowly with horrible soundtrack choices, awkward acting, and ends in a confusing and unsatisfying way.

While I respect originality, I found none of it here. Sean Bridgers acting reminded me of Will Ferrel, only serious. The story of removing someone living in a primitive way and into society is nothing new. It could be Pocahontas, or Nell (1994) or a number of others. Just take sense out of the equation and you get The Woman.

Ketchum seems to have a fetish with tying up women and then abusing them. He already made "The Girl Next Door" (2007) and it seems as though he's looking to repeat that success, if you wish to call it such. I believe he's trying to make it come across as something feminist but beyond the patriarchal lifestyle there isn't much here that's revealing anything interesting and again, new.

The music is rather unnecessary and fails to invoke any sort emotion other than annoyance at having to turn the volume down after turning it up to listen to whispered lines that don't meet any sort of quality acting standards themselves. This leads to a number of scenes that slow to a crawl and made me feel as though I were watching an angsty music video. The music just did not fit.

After an hour in, I felt it had been much longer. There aren't any characters to root for except the teenage girl but she only succeeds in making you sympathetic before making some odd choices that force you to question her all over. There was a development of the teacher's character but it sank before it even began. There are hints at sexual abuse but never confirmation. No one seems to be aware of getting help. Police are non-existent. The teenage girl develops a mutual understanding with the Woman apparently through her being pregnant, again never explained. I'm fine with not having my hand held, but when things get this convoluted, and there are several missing pieces to the puzzle, there seems little point in solving it.

It began interesting. The middle slowly, very slowly developed. Then there is a burst of excitement and race to the finish, but the last scene and the scene after the credits left me so confused that I couldn't imagine ever watching this ineffective experiment again.

The movie is nothing as advertised and would probably have been significantly better had it actually been about civilizing a "wild woman." I'm not giving it a negative review because it's advertised wrong. I'm giving it a negative review because it's garbage. If you're into plots that never quite develop and wish to see a woman tied up for two hours while the rest of the awkwardness continues then this is for you. It's not even so bad it's good. The only reason the movie might stick in your mind, is because you'll never be able to understand what it was you just watched or why.

Our feature presentation begins with a feral female in the wild attacking a dog. She was filthy, feral, and presumably unable to speak. After that attention grabbing scene we're transported to a nice, civilized pool party with your basic middle class Americans. The eldest daughter Peggy Cleek (Lauren Ashley Carter) was sitting poolside rebuffing a boy. The father, Chris Cleek (Sean Bridges), was at the grill with the mother, Belle (Angela Bettis), close by. The son, Brian (Zach Rand), was idly watching a girl getting bullied, and the youngest daughter, Darlin' (Shyla Molhusen), was aggressively trying to kiss a boy.

Remember the woman in the wild I mentioned? Chris Cleek captured her in the wild and brought her home to his cellar to domesticate her (I suppose). Who knew that this all-American family was headed by a sadistic patriarch?

In the meantime, there is something strange happening with the teenage daughter Peg. Her math teacher, Miss Genevieve Raton (Carlee Baker), correctly guessed that Peg was pregnant. It wouldn't take us viewers long to surmise that her father was the father.

What interested me the most was the actions of The Woman (Pollyanna McIntosh). In the end when she was freed by Peg she viciously attacked the wife Belle first. She chewed up Belle's face like a chimpanzee. It was assumed that she would go straight after Chris and his perverted son, but she chose the mom first which reminded me of Elizabeth Fritzl.

Elizabeth Fritzl is an Austrian woman who was locked in her father's cellar for 24 years. In that time he repeatedly raped her and fathered seven of her children. When Elizabeth finally got out she was instrumental in making sure her father was prosecuted, but she also cut off her mom. Why? Because her mom was such a passive bystander in her long abusive marriage that she allowed her husband, Joseph Fritzl, to abuse her children, and more importantly, keep one of the children imprisoned for 24 years. For that reason alone Elizabeth wanted nothing to do with her mother.

The parallels in "The Woman" are uncanny. The Woman may not have been Chris and Belle's daughter, but Belle did nothing while her husband violated her teenage daughter and The Woman.

"The Woman" ended very gorily, yet satisfying. I didn't need to see her eat Chris's beating heart, but boy did I want to see him and his son painfully suffer. The gore was the only drawback of this otherwise fantastic find. Wow what a woman!

So far I haven't been that impressed with Lucky McKee's films, but with The Woman he has become a director who has found his voice. It's a singular and deeply personal vision and for the first time in a film of his, it all comes together. I still find it difficult to put my finger on what makes the film so upsetting and I will need another couple of viewings to completely get my head around it, but this is part of the film's brilliance.

In short, The Woman is about a man who, on a hunting trip, comes across and entraps a feral woman who lives in the woods. He decides to chain her up in his basement to 'civilise' her. He involves his family, as if this were a project like building a garden shed. As the film goes on it becomes clear that the man, a pillar of the community, has been mistreating the female members of his household for a long time and the character of "the woman" comes to personify and externalise what has been broken in that family all along.

While the last act erupts in bloody violence, it's the emotional violence and the effect on its characters that we experience along the way, which is really upsetting. There is also some pitch black humour in the film, which only makes the film more disturbing.

There has already been some controversy when there were walk-outs at Sundance where the film has been accused of misogyny, but I don't think that's the case. This is a feminist horror film, but one that avoids trite lectures and finger wagging moralising. Just because a film depicts something, doesn't mean it approves of it.

The film sits between something like a Todd Solondz film but without the hipster nihilism and the visceral rawness of recent French torture horror films like Martyrs or Inside but without the moral vacuity or leering voyeurism. Those looking for a straightforward shocker may be disappointed, because the film constantly side steps the conventions and clichés of the genre. McKee doesn't give you fake scares to jolt you or conventional suspense sequences and it doesn't "reward" you with violence, when you expect it. If you are open to McKee's approach then the film will crawl under your skin and it will fester there and that's what I call a real horror film.

The film's horror lies in its characters and in the unequal power dynamic between men and women. On the surface this may look like a film about a monster woman killing people or it maybe about a family trapping and abusing a feral women, but while those are aspects of the film, they aren't really what the film is about. The emotional pay off to these genre conventions is completely different from other modern horror films and their depiction never resorts to clichés. It's a film that gives an audience what it needs, rather than what it wants.

A note on the acting some comments have been complaining about. The performances by the entire cast are amazing. Those complaining about the actors in the film don't seem to get that the performances are non-naturalistic on purpose. The acting style fits the sense of allegory and heightened reality, yet the actors still get to the truth behind their characters. In a perfect world they should hand Sean Bridgers, who plays the father, the Oscar for best actor now and be done with it. Angela Bettis' fragile frame and sad face have never been put to better use. The actress who plays 'the woman' is truly ferocious and the kids are great too, especially the teenage daughter whose slow withdrawal from the world is painful to watch.

The use of a rock soundtrack in the film is also fantastic, which gives it a raw punk power and aesthetic. There is a moment where the mother allows herself to connect and identify with the 'woman's' plight, while a guitar chord drones on and it is absolutely exhilarating.

There are things in this film which during my initial viewing I reacted against and now when I think back on it, they were absolutely perfect creative choices. Shot digitally and looking it, using slow motion, fish eye lenses and many dissolves at times seemingly at random, the film is often quite ugly looking but this only adds to it's raw, ragged punk quality. The fate of one central character genuinely appalled me and for a moment I hated the film, but then thinking back, it was absolutely the right thing to do.

I'm a jaded viewer of horror movies by now and its not often that a film gets to genuinely mess with my head and leaves me richer for it. The horror genre needs more films like this.