This film tries to do some interesting things, but it fails.
It tries to be a feminist critique of old fashioned sexism, and so we have a young woman whose father has sold her to an abusive husband who controls her and is unable to show any affection for her. Where it goes from there is an absurd slippery slope. Her first subtle step toward disobeying her husband leads her headlong into sociopathic selfishness. I could almost handle that as a statement of "look what oppression does to people," but other details in the film suggest the message that women are better under control. She was immediately attracted to a man whom she caught leading a group sexual assault on another woman, and she stifled her feelings until the man forced himself into her room and sexually assaulted her (I mean, what girl can resist a rapist).
The plot was tense, and I watched it partly out of intrigue and partly out of curiosity. There were a number of complications throughout, but they became progressively less believable. The writer seemed to have thought less about the logic/motivation of each new twist, and by the end, the turns in the plot had become consistently both absurd and unsurprising. I gave up trying to find a way to explain the ridiculous choices the characters made because they were largely unexplainable.
The casting was the final weirdness. A great deal of the cast were black actors. Had this been a light-hearted comedy or action flick, I would have been okay with the anachronistic lack of racism, but since it was a starkly realistic film focused on ugly human behavior, it makes no sense to pretend that that one didn't exist in that time and place. A glaring example of this is when a black woman walks into the home of a white woman in 19th century Scotland and makes demands of her, demands which the white woman seems powerless to resist. I feel weird complaining that a black character had social power in a film's story, but in the context, it feels wrong. Not only were there very few people of African descent in that time in Scotland, but they certainly would not have been able to lord themselves over white people, as that particular character did to the protagonist. I can't help wondering if the director just wanted to earn progressive points by saying at parties (to other white people of course) that he had hired some of "those people" for his film.
It tries to be a feminist critique of old fashioned sexism, and so we have a young woman whose father has sold her to an abusive husband who controls her and is unable to show any affection for her. Where it goes from there is an absurd slippery slope. Her first subtle step toward disobeying her husband leads her headlong into sociopathic selfishness. I could almost handle that as a statement of "look what oppression does to people," but other details in the film suggest the message that women are better under control. She was immediately attracted to a man whom she caught leading a group sexual assault on another woman, and she stifled her feelings until the man forced himself into her room and sexually assaulted her (I mean, what girl can resist a rapist).
The plot was tense, and I watched it partly out of intrigue and partly out of curiosity. There were a number of complications throughout, but they became progressively less believable. The writer seemed to have thought less about the logic/motivation of each new twist, and by the end, the turns in the plot had become consistently both absurd and unsurprising. I gave up trying to find a way to explain the ridiculous choices the characters made because they were largely unexplainable.
The casting was the final weirdness. A great deal of the cast were black actors. Had this been a light-hearted comedy or action flick, I would have been okay with the anachronistic lack of racism, but since it was a starkly realistic film focused on ugly human behavior, it makes no sense to pretend that that one didn't exist in that time and place. A glaring example of this is when a black woman walks into the home of a white woman in 19th century Scotland and makes demands of her, demands which the white woman seems powerless to resist. I feel weird complaining that a black character had social power in a film's story, but in the context, it feels wrong. Not only were there very few people of African descent in that time in Scotland, but they certainly would not have been able to lord themselves over white people, as that particular character did to the protagonist. I can't help wondering if the director just wanted to earn progressive points by saying at parties (to other white people of course) that he had hired some of "those people" for his film.