Bro.
Bro.
I fucking loved this movie. It was nasty. It was great. It spoke to me on a fundamental level.
Let me start with something I wrote right after it:
excellent film, fresh 2022, however all the thirst on kemp when mollie is there is insane. also the man is a cheater. filthy cheating bastard. he deserved it. bro couldn’t take what he was dishing out. this movie made me physically ill. this movie made me insane. this movie reminded me of the pinterest ad i keep seeing that makes me deeply uncomfortable where it zooms in on mouths eating, which is why i cover my mouth when i eat
How can I describe how good it is? How can I possibly sit and let the experience distill down into words without sitting and making an outline first, which is not what I’m going to do, so life is going to have to deal with me just free-formin’ this shit.
Firstly? It hits all the right notes of scary. Right away I pegged this dude as a serial killer (context, of course, was a given, but anyway). Any woman in the modern world knows— or will very quickly come to know— that Steve was dripping in red flags. No social media? No family photos? No friends? Immediately asking about, do you have anyone? Do you want to go on a romantic getaway about a week into the relationship? You’re not like other girls. Hey, did you tell people about me? No pictures, please. Red flags. Everywhereeee. Luckily, Noa has a friend who will move heaven and earth to help her. Mollie is a queen.
Secondly? Literally consuming a woman being a metaphor for the pieces she has to sacrifice and the pieces of herself that get taken away by being forced into a role, being forced to give up herself, in order to please a man? Pieces of them getting sold to the highest bidder to men who want to feel close to an image of a woman, what they feel a woman should be and not the reality of the woman? Forcing an image of femininity on someone as she is cut up to fit into the ideal? C’mon, dude, c’mon.
Then we touch on the idea of cannibalism as a metaphor for love. You see it a lot in horror-adjacent media: being consumed and becoming part of another person, being something that nourishes them as the souls entwine— to consume a person is to become one. Here we have Steve’s twisted take on that love, consuming and selling this “love” from unconsenting parties. He is forcing his idea of love on women, taking them apart and leaving them suffering. It isn’t just obviously fucked up, but it’s showcasing abuse as literally as it can. C’mon!
Steve already has a family, a wife, a job. He has everything one could possibly want to be happy and loved and fulfilled. His wife is fully aware of what he does and she is even one of his prior victims, and she accepts it. And yet! He finds another woman, lies through his teeth constantly, has these “profound” conversations with her to try to sway her into his point of view to make her understand him on a level he craves, and happily ignores his wife and family to wine and dine Noa. Noa, meanwhile, is doing the number one self-protection move: keeping her head down, studying everything around her, and biding her time.
Ultimately she ends up taking a bite out of Steve and running away. The man curses her for it— despite his declaration of it as the ultimate form of love. It’s only okay if he is the one in power, the one taking and sculpting. As soon as the tables are turned? He’s pissed. He goes on the warpath.
It’s such a good film and I will probably rewatch it (and even get a physical copy if I can). I did sit with this feeling of nausea in me, though— I get weirdly empathetic about people getting parts of them removed. I think everyone gets that way? But to imagine someone carving out parts of you to eat and then having to live without it is… mortifying. So. Nausea. But it’s a great film and worth watching! There’s a bit of humor thrown in once in a while as well that takes some edges off, but damn.
