She Will: Ashes

It’s got to be one of the most tired cliches in writing about scary movies - using the word “visceral” as a sort of double entendre, referring both to the way a film can grip you on a level other than the intellectual and how lots of horror films are really gory. Get it? Get it? Because there are guts! Annoys the hell out of me. But, that said, I think there’s something to the idea that a film should be visceral, or that at least in horror a visceral element is important. Appreciation is good, but being moved? That’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for the films I watch to make me feel things, if not especially comfortable or reassuring things.

And that is, I think, my only real problem with She Will. It’s a gorgeously shot and constructed story of righteous vengeance and reclamation that ends up being, in the final analysis, a little too cerebral.

The film opens with a long shot of what resolves into a view of a lake, a forest, a horizon. Gradually it becomes evident that we’re seeing it inverted, the lake is the sky and the forest the ambiguous dividing line, an abstraction like a warped Rothko painting. There’s a woman on a train watching the lakeside view blur by, and her reverie is interrupted by intrusive flashes of some kind of medical procedure - operating room lights, hovering masked figures, a scalpel slicing into flesh, juxtaposed with the application of lipstick. Red against skin, and a voice-over talks about the importance of masks, wearing masks as a form of self-preservation.

The voice belongs to Veronica Ghent, a retired actress who has just had a double mastectomy and is now traveling to a remote retreat in Scotland to rest and recuperate far from anyone’s prying eyes. She’s accompanied by Desi, her nurse, but doesn’t seem especially happy about it. She doesn’t like being told when to take her pills. She doesn’t like much of anything, it seems. You get the sense that her life has been difficult. She’s imperious, cutting, someone with decades of practice at keeping others at arm’s length. Her current state of vulnerability is deeply unpleasant to her and she doesn’t want anyone’s help or attention. She refers to herself as a “forgotten movie star,” gulps Tramadol and stays as far from the spotlight as possible. She has nightmares, wakes up gasping.

It's a difficult time for her - along with the major surgery, it’s all over the news that the director responsible for her first major role in a universally acclaimed film is about to receive a knighthood. She has memories of that time as intrusive as the surgery. She remembers her younger self, bruised and battered. She was “special” to him. She was 13 years old. And now he’s being celebrated while she’s tried to make herself as invisible as possible, described in the media as “retired” and “controversial.” You know, sort of like how actresses who complain about sexual harassment are labeled “difficult.”

And so she arrives at this resort in rural Scotland, only to discover that it won’t be a solitary retreat after all - those are booked later in the year, right now they’re just booking group retreats, and Veronica recoils with the idea of spending her recuperation among other people, and you sort of don’t blame her - the people at this retreat are largely buffoons, sneering and pretentious, entitled. She wants to leave, but a rainstorm has washed out all the roads and nobody can get a signal on their cell phones. So they’ll have to make the best of it. Veronica and Desi are given a cabin far away from everyone else, and it’s maybe a little more rustic than she’d like, but it keeps her distant. It’s right on the edge of the forest, and this part of Scotland is known for its restorative properties.

You see, so many women were burned here as witches that their ashes have changed the composition of the soil. And Veronica finds herself sleepwalking out into the forest. Clinging to the earth.

The shape of this film becomes apparent pretty quickly. This is a place where women have been subject to men’s whims for a very long time, and so Veronica’s loss and grief and long-festering trauma, the blithe indifference of the other guests, they’re just one more in a long history of similar stories, of a land that has in its bones the oppression of women, the subjugation of women to the needs of men. It’s just under the surface in more ways than one - the women who are guests at the resort are clueless at best and smugly complacent at worst, not wanting to see the boat rocked because then they’ll lose what meager scraps of privilege they’ve been afforded. But the women who work there have a sort of weary awareness about them - they’ve seen a lot, and not just the difficulties of riding herd on city folk out in the countryside. Veronica being here in this place awakens something in her, or maybe something here begins to speak through her, use her as a conduit or vessel. Centuries of women needing to be heard. Needing justice.

One of this film’s biggest strengths - and it’s a big one - is the coherence of its vision. It’s absolutely beautifully shot, full of exteriors where the sky looms, low and pregnant with rain, and the grass and mud so tactile as to be almost sensuous, contrasted with the bright, sharp angles of a city, the coldness of concrete and marble. The nights are full of shadows inside and out, the days are somber if not gloomy, and a night in the only nearby pub renders the mundane almost magical, painting one character into a study in gold and silver…at least before it all goes wrong in ugly, squalid, and utterly inevitable fashion. Motifs are repeated and juxtaposed and recombined in such a way that communicates exactly what’s happening without needing a lot of exposition, often verging on the hallucinatory, and indeed the line between reality and reverie isn’t ever really all that firmly drawn. There’s blood, there’s lipstick, there’s earth and fire and the memory of a young girl and of hundreds of women before her, all playing out in Veronica’s mind like a broadcast from centuries of trauma. It’s a story of renewal, cleansing, one that reappropriates fire as way to purify instead of eradicate, and we watch Veronica blossom as she channels what has happened here before to redress what is happening now, and continues to happen over and over again. The imagery is an easily comprehended vocabulary, not especially cryptic, and it means we intuit the story as much as we watch it.

So it's a very beautiful movie, one with a clear point of view, but it’s also a cold one - there’s a detachment, a restraint to a lot of it. The moment Veronica meets the other guests is rendered as claustrophobic and oppressive as any cocktail hour could ever be, but after that it really does maintain a certain distance on everything, which robs it of some of the visceral impact that I think would really let it sing. I appreciate the irony of this criticism in the face of the sexist assumption that women are “too emotional,” but as much as this film engages intellectually and points to the pain Veronica and so many others have suffered, it doesn’t really bring the viewer into that. There’s no crescendo to the film, no pitch of howling rage or fury. It ticks along , thoughtful and measured. But it seems to me that the centuries of pain and oppression and cruel indifference that it astutely and acidly etches for the audience demands something that burns hotter than that. Fire isn’t polite and restrained, it’s hot and eats everything in its path, leaving only ashes, and I think the film could have used more of that.

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