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One night at a party, a woman meets a charismatic man.
Shes smitten; he is too.
But lets be honest, weve seen this film before.
And by now, weve heard what the genre has to say about feminism.
Its a simple message: Rape culture hides in plain sight.
Of course, any conscientious consumer of these movies already knows that.
On a personal level, how can survivors of sexual violence reclaim ourselves in its aftermath?
We never know these women before they are sucked into the Rube Goldberg plots of the Me Too movie.
The filmmakers, of course, have justifications for why their female characters are so hollow.
InDont Worry Darling, Alice presses herself against a glass wall to exit theMatrix-esque simulation in which shes imprisoned.
As a rule, these thrillers do not venture past such moments of consciousness-raising.
Instead, they substitute rushed, pandering empowerment for self-realization.
shoutsDont Worry Darlings Alice, when she discovers that shes not a housewife but a surgeon.
(The viewer has no ideawhatAlice likes about medicine.)
Its my turn now, as she knifes her spouse.
(Her turn … for what?
The Me Too thriller doesnt seem to think thats a worthwhile question.)
It is extraordinarily difficult to say anything original about sexual abuse.
Groomers and rapists and their colluders are fundamentally unoriginal.
They follow patterns: They love-bomb, they gaslight, they victim-blame.
It can be illuminating to articulate these repeatable patterns to identify them as patterns at all.
But good art should do more than just faithfully render the real world.
It should surprise us, even as it shows us what we may already suspect.
The power of genre conceits, in particular, is that theycanreintroduce us to the known in startling ways.
The therapist blinks twice.
Feigenbaum, neglect to elucidate Frida and her friend still accept an invitation to Slaters Jeffrey Epsteinesque island.
The plot demands of the Me Too thriller leave no space for the film to get hung up onwhy.
What exactly is Frida drawn to about Slater?
How does her inner life change as she comes to suspect somethings wrong?
How does she relate to herself, her friends, other men, other women?
Why spoil the thrill of revealing the patriarchy with the messy details of an actual womans life?
before ending up in an asylum.
The answer is that we might see terrible men as, ultimately, buffoons.
A little-discussed truth about abusers is that they are terrifying in one light but fools in another.
Abusers might be cliches, but movies about abuse dont have to be.
