Delayed Reaction: The Woman

Premise: A rural family capture a wild woman and keep her in their basement.

 

This is a baffling movie. Some of that is on me. Most is on the film. What I didn’t realize going in is that this is actually part 2 of a series of so far 3 films. The first was Offspring in 2009. The third is Darlin’ in 2019. Pollyanna McIntosh’s nameless woman is the linking element of the franchise. She belongs to a tribe of cannibals who live in the wild in the Northeast US. I didn’t realize any of this going in. That would’ve helped a little, because The Woman does little to explain this.

 

From my perspective when I watched this, the movie is about a man (Sean Bridgers) seeing a wild woman bathing while he goes hunting one day. He knocks her out and chains her in the family cellar. Then he shows this to his wife, daughter, and son. The family, specifically the wife and teenage daughter, seem unsettled by this but go along with it because...I have no clue. It’s pretty clear that the father and the son have a boner for the woman. The son is even more disturbed than the father. The mother is pretty afraid of the father. Clearly that’s an abusive relationship. And the daughter is used to shutting down as a defense mechanism. No characters use their words and the actors aren’t good enough to express what they need to silently. I spent most of the movie not understanding why they would go along with this and why the father felt so comfortable showing this to them. It turns out, the family has already been raising a young cannibal boy as a dog. You’d think that would explain the performances, but it actually doesn’t. The family don’t respond to the father with a “Dad’s up to his old shit again” attitude. They seem shocked and surprised. The middle of the movie is missing all sorts of conversations about why he’s doing that or acknowledgement that they even know about this cannibal tribe that they clearly know about.

 

The quality and performances are so bad that I kept thinking that maybe this is some kind of John Waters-style satire. That’s giving it too much credit. This movie is just bad. Very bad. If anything I’ve said makes it sound interesting, then I have failed. This isn’t “fun bad”. It’s just bafflingly bad. The wrong decision was made everywhere. It’s paced horribly. It made the objectively short 101-minute runtime still feel interminable. This was an awful viewing experience. Apologies to anyone who worked on this and put effort into it. I truly hated this.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don’t Recommend