Jakob’s Wife Review: A Gory, Subtext-Blaring Portrait of a Marriage Upended

Travis Stevens’s Jakob’s Wife initially plays out in a reserved, almost staid fashion that befits a film that opens on a church sermon. Anne Fedder (Barbara Crampton) sits in the pews listening to her minister husband, Jakob Fedder (Larry Fessenden), preach about a man’s duty to his wife. Even outside of the church, this is the dynamic of their marriage, and when the two of them speak to someone, the camera tends to frame Jakob in the foreground of the shot to a degree that obscures Anne but still leaves her in focus, emphasizing her passivity. He’s the talker, while she’s the listener, as well as the one often being talked over, less of an individual than an extension of the man she married.

The film’s tone, though, transforms not long after Anne has a strange encounter in the abandoned gin mill that she’s in charge of renovating. After coming home late one night and, unbeknownst to Jakob, covered in blood, Anne is a changed woman. The next day, she straightens her hair, puts on dress clothes, and wears an accessory on her neck that obscures her new bite mark. Jakob is confused by this turn of events, if not entirely displeased save for the newfound assertiveness that finds Anne contradicting his instructions to a waiter and, horror of horrors, taking the Lord’s name in vain. Propelled by absurd geysers of blood and bumbling characters who are more than once caught with a corpse, Jakob’s Wife becomes an outright horror comedy. It’s as if the film itself has been enlivened alongside Anne, much of its humor deriving from the couple’s attempts to adapt to a new normal.

The history of horror is littered with meek mortals who turn into sexy vampires, and that familiar transformation is complicated in Jakob’s Wife by decades of marriage. Jakob is willing to hunt other, feral vampires and help accommodate Anne’s hunger because, in a way, it feeds into the barest skeleton of their marital routine, of a husband providing for his wife. If anything, what truly makes him uncomfortable is the shift in their power dynamic, for the way it cuts through the quiet dominance that once defined their relationship.

A perplexed expression slides across Jakob’s face when his slight, spontaneous attempts to instill guilt in Anne don’t seem to work anymore. The film excels at communicating the boredom and irritation that long ago came to define this marriage, of gender roles having been fortified over time not due to any sinister calculation, but simply because that’s what these two individuals believed to be their lot in life, with Jakob oblivious to just how stifling it all was all along. Rather than a master manipulator or a physical abuser, the film sees him as a bad and banal husband who would probably be genuinely shocked to be labeled as such.

In contrast to their initial disinterest in one another, Jakob and Anne develop an amusing chemistry when they bicker over things like who gets to bring a wooden stake to a vampire lair. We’re meant to believe that danger brings a little spark back into a relationship that long ago grew dreary, but the film’s initial portrayal of their unspoken marital strife ultimately overpowers the semi-reconciliation that follows. Prior to being bitten, Anne wears a truly withering look on her face, a tiredness that reads like disgust when intercut with extreme close-ups of Jakob chewing or brushing his teeth. Subdued though it is, their lethargy is so palpable that it becomes difficult to picture what Anne and Jakob might have been like as a happy couple, and as a result, the slight rekindling of their marriage feels more like an abrupt left turn than a logical next step when coupled with the early tonal shift.

Also, as in so many horror movies that don’t completely trust their audiences to keep up, Anne soon begins to baldly state Jakob’s Wife’s thesis aloud, mentioning how she and Jakob need to continue “as equals” and that she rather likes her new lease on life. And this overemphatic approach is doubly unnecessary because the film quite memorably communicates its ideas through its visuals. For a while, Jakob’s Wife is well acted, sturdily constructed, and psychologically astute, but it lumbers to a half-baked conclusion that’s unfortunately consistent with its overriding goal of turning subtext into extremely legible text.