I watched this film with Bobby Frederick Tilley, with whom we discussed A Field in England last season. We watched it remotely on Shudder, nearly as soon as it was released in 2022. And we were both immediately struck by the production design, which is lavish, nuanced, detailed, and painfully, unspeakably stylish.
My favorite horror movies have always been ones about witches. I love a smart film and I love a feminist film. And sometimes it happens that films about witches, when they are made well, are both smart and feminist. So between its ethos and its execution, I was basically hooked from the first dreamy, dreamlike frames. And while this is helmed by writer and first time feature director Charlotte Colbert, the film has quite a pedigree. In addition to it having been produced by Dario “Arpeggio” “DiGiorno,” “Mario Wario,” it also involved the participation of Edward Pressman, who was also the producer of Brian De Palma's Sisters, which starred a pre-safety scissors in the shrubbery Margot Kidder, and De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise. He also produced American Psycho, which is another impressive horror film directed by a woman. And he produced one of my all-time favorite non-horror films, Reversal of Fortune, which is a really charming family drama about my personal hero, Claus von Bülow, whose screenplay features one of my all-time favorite jokes ever written for the screen, “What do you give a wife who has everything? An injection of insulin.”
She Will features Alice Krige, whose genre work goes back to Ghost Story from 1981. She’s an excellent actress with a commanding presence and a graphic face. She's been hitting it out of the park for decades in genre films like Sleepwalkers, Silent Hill, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the 2022 version in which Olwen Fouéré, who plays the groundskeepeer in She Will, appears as Sally Hardesty all grown up). And latterly, Krige did Gretel and Hansel, which is another feminist take on a classic story to create a new genre entry. I think it's remarkable that in 2022, a film in a genre which often really prioritizes youth to appeal to its young audiences placed a woman of a certain age as the locus of its story. Alice Krige is the literal body on which the narrative is written. And I think in that sense, it can be considered alongside 2021's The Manor with Barbara Hershey, which is less artful, but not exactly unsuccessful. And I think it certainly has echoes of the “grand dame guignol” subgenre, which proliferated in the 60s with films like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, Dead Ringer, The Anniversary, Lady in a Cage, and Die Die My Darling.
But here in She Will, we're in deadly serious territory. And we're looking at a direct response to the #MeToo movement, which utilizes a kind of oblique and metaphor-drenched approach to examine and to respond to its cultural and social context. In its taxonomy, in its Carolus Linnaeus binomial nomenclature, it may be a story involving witches and witchcraft, but it's so much more than that. It's folk-tinged supernatural psychological horror. And like its design, its construction is nuanced even if its screenplay is perhaps at times less so. Like other films—David Gordon Green's Halloween franchise contributions, for example—which also foreground the story of an older female lead, this one also looks at trauma and how trauma resurfaces and colors our perceptions of reality. It looks at lineage and our place in it on the continuum of time. And in an existential way, a much subtler way than cosmic horror might, it looks at the macro versus the micro, and forces us to examine our relationship to things that are greater and older than ourselves and our own experiences to something approaching the infinite.
In She Will, phony mysticism is pitted against true mystical transformation. There's a tension here between pain and the release from pain. That pain is physical, it's emotional, it's psychic, it's psychological, and there's a surreal friction between waking and dreaming that makes us question reality, even implicitly in the last reel, and that will ultimately burst into flame. For all of these reasons, it is by turns destabilizing and hypnotic and vengeful and mythic. And it casts a gorgeous, hallucinogenic spell amid black falling witch feathers.
When Alice Krige, Veronica Ghent, is first revealed—is it day or night when that reveal happens?—she's like Norma Desmond speeding through the Scottish countryside. She's an aging actress until very recently in bad health, and she's aboard this luxury train liner that's all gold and chestnut and copper and terracotta, and she looks like an idol of the earth, even though she's an idol formerly of the screen. She's imperious but broken, really shattered. She's lost a lot of what she considers to be essential components of her identity and femininity. And as a defense mechanism, she's heightened certain imperious attributes of her persona to form this kind of carapace, this armor that is caustic and scathing, as a form of self-protection, along with things like a turban and sunglasses and a fur.
It has become a ritual, she says, putting the layers on. Every mask has a function. And in these first spoken lines of dialogue in the film, I think Colbert has assiduously and effectively encapsulated a lot of what her intention is. Through a haze of anesthesia, we see surgery that is taking away and it requires a nearly surgical approach to restore. A surgeon's scalpel and a mascara wand are both wielded with squelchy and exacting precision in those opening moments. And through that haze, her blood and the lipstick on her mouth are two halves of the same idea and the same shade of red. Her speech and dialogue are suffused with a kind of banal glamour that permeates a lot of the writing, especially upfront. When Veronica is handed a paper cup of painkillers by Desi, she says, “Tramadol, breakfast of movie stars.” She's obsessed in a sort of Norma Desmond way with the fineness and the studied perfection of her appearance, and yet she can't bear to look at herself in the mirror. In moments like that one with Desi and the paper cup, I think we wonder if it's also the connection with a younger woman and what we perceive in that moment to be the fullness of her femaleness and her vivacity that Ghent is actually avoiding.
Again, with regard to the writing, when it works, it's very witty and knowing. It sets up the horror tropes that we might expect it to explore, using the knowing language of cinema that an actress can very clearly articulate. At one point, Veronica says, “Like the beginning of one of those horror movies, the young ingenue, you, is brought somewhere remote to be sacrificed in a horrendous way to feed an aging community that refuses to die.” Like that other feminist horror film that we've previously discussed, Men, there are a lot of visual and narrative metaphors at work here. Specifically, I think the metaphor of intrusion is fascinating. The other unanticipated guests at that Scottish manor retreat intrude into Veronica's privacy as cancer has intruded into her body. The peat, the earth intrudes through a drop of water into Veronica's bath. Only this intrusion, painful as it seems for Veronica to experience as it rewinds history, hers and in a larger sense, society's, it rebuilds as it interpenetrates. Veronica's primal scream in the bathtub places her on a kind of precipice and it brings down a fog of memory through which she can ironically see with greater clarity. And that moment ignites both the fire of inspiration and Veronica's trajectory of healing, of empowerment, of expiation and expurgation, and of a kind of communion with the divine feminine toward a kind of supernatural ecstasy in which Veronica is transfigured. She becomes the scarlet woman of the apocalypse. She becomes the whore of Babylon, the mother of prostitutes, the great city that rules over the kings of the earth.
Essentially, she embraces her femaleness and her power, and that creates her as the thing men fear most. And it allows her to retake control in her life, in her story and in her body. She speaks early in the film, en route to the cabin for the first time in the rain about the apocalypse. And in the end, in fire, she becomes emblematic of it, metaphorically, and seemingly in reality too. But again, that question of reality and what it is, literally voiced in the end by Veronica Ghent, remains elusive, and makes the film that much more compelling and that much more interesting to discuss and to attempt to untangle.
To listen to our take on She Will, click here.
Bradford Louryk