She Will Review: A Visually Overcooked, Narratively Underbaked Freak-Out

She Will can’t decide if its horror or comedy, nor does it strike the balance that would harmoniously hybridize them.

She Will
Photo: IFC Films

Style is the watchword in Charlotte Colbert’s She Will. With each shot vying to eclipse the next in atmosphere and composition, the film is a worthy successor to the ’70s Italian genre films that clearly inspired it. At the same time, its #MeToo politics, however ham-fisted, are a rebuke of the blasé misogyny that too often sours Colbert’s sources of inspiration. Ironically, if its style weren’t so fully formed, the flimsy characterizations and stabs at meta-commentary that mar the script might be easier to overlook.

At the start of She Will, aging actress Veronica Gant (Alice Krige) is traveling by train with her caregiver, Desi (Kota Ebergardt), to a retreat in the Scottish Highlands, where she plans to convalesce after a double mastectomy. Propelled to stardom at age 13 by her role in the ’70s hit Navajo Frontier, Veronica has never fully recovered from the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of the now unassailable director, Hathbourne (Malcolm McDowell).

When they get to the retreat, Veronica is repulsed to discover a gaggle of visitors being led in meditation and plein air classes by the clownish Tirador (Rupert Everett). (Their function as comedic relief is too underbaked not to feel extraneous, let alone at odds with the film’s ultra-serious editing and cinematography.) But the moody weather and high ash content of the local peat, said to be the product of witch-burnings in the late Middle Ages, seems to reinvigorate Veronica. No longer in need of heavy-duty sleeping pills, she begins to experience dreams that blend visitations from the torched victims, flashes of her own trauma, and vengeance exacted on Hathbourne. Meanwhile, her cruel treatment of Desi gradually softens.

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Soon, the film starts to feel like an excuse to trot out the avant-garde techniques seemingly demanded of dream sequences. Superimposition, montage, repetition of split-second motifs (a charred woman on the stake, a scalpel slicing into flesh, stockinged feet backing away from the camera), geometrical abstractions suggestive of a liquid light show—all combine to form a hallucinatory layer cake of images that would be exhilarating in isolation. Colbert admirably returns our attention to the film medium, not just as an unobtrusive vehicle for story, but a language to itself. But since the story couldn’t be excised altogether without damaging commercial viability, it’s a shame that it feels like a dead weight dragging the visuals down.

For one thing, She Will can’t decide if it’s horror or comedy, nor does it strike the balance that would harmoniously hybridize them. In one scene, Desi stumbles across Veronica’s vibrator while searching her bedroom for an anything that might account for her employer’s nightly disappearances. She hears a disturbance and tiptoes downstairs, brandishing the vibrator like a gun or a baseball bat. She surprises the stranger (Jack Greenlees) replenishing the wood supply for their furnace. Flirtatious banter ensues. Tonally, the scene is played for laughs, but its humor is later hollowed out when the man attempts to drug and rape her.

In another scene, Tirador quotes Foucault on the power dynamics of the gaze. Given that it comes from the mouth of a character who’s been portrayed until now as a goofball, it’s hard to decide whether to read this as a too-loud, self-reflexive statement of the film’s themes (better served by the images anyway) or a deflation of them. Veronica jumps in to explain Tirador’s explanation, in case we didn’t get it: “Millennia of patriarchy dictate how we see.”

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She Will attempts to flip the power dynamics of horror by centering what the genre has traditionally tarred as monstrous. Colbert and co-screenwriter Kitty Percy expect us to identify with Veronica in her alliance with the witches and to relish in their vengeance. This subversion would hit harder, though, if it weren’t hamstrung by the film’s failure to decide how seriously to take itself. On the strength of visuals alone, She Will nearly succeeds in changing “how we see,” but with a script that condescends to the audience one moment, then laughs it off the next, what we see lacks sufficient depth or coherence to make it stick.

Score: 
 Cast: Alice Krige, Kota Eberhardt, Malcolm McDowell, Rupert Everett, Jack Greenlees  Director: Charlotte Colbert  Screenwriter: Kitty Percy, Charlotte Colbert  Distributor: IFC Midnight  Running Time: 95 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

William Repass

William Repass’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. For links to his published writing, click here.

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