Four Feminist Films (Spoilers)

When you search for feminist movie lists on the internet, the results can often be disappointing with any movie featuring more women than “normal” being labelled as feminist even if it has nothing to do with feminism. Girl power movies about women supporting each other are great and uplifting, but often don’t actually include feminist themes. When I seek out feminist films I am looking for something that challenges societal norms and makes you think about it for days or weeks afterwards. Something that feels subversive and a bit dangerous. A film you can’t believe made it past all the male producers and execs who normally murder such projects. Here are my four choices of recent films that meet this criteria:

Promising Young Woman (2020)

Written and directed by a woman. Set in present time, this film centers on a young woman named Cassie who drops out of medical school after her best friend is raped at a party and then commits suicide after no one believes her or helps her. Cassie gives up becoming a doctor to instead become a vigilante targeting rapists. Her family starts pressuring her to have career ambition again and when a love interest comes along it looks like she is going to quit her vigilante ways… but then she learns her love interest was present during her friend’s rape and did nothing to help her and in response to this knowledge she turns the dial of her vigilantism up to eleven, damn the consequences (and there are very real consequence).

This film specifically deals with how poorly women are treated by their peers, family, the legal system, and society after being abused by men. It lays out all the guilty parties who knew better, but didn’t do better. It is very intentional in the film that Cassie is never violent in her vigilantism, but her forcing the perpetrators to really look at their ill deeds results in violence against Cassie. The choice reflects the reality of the outcome of #metoo —that women telling the hard truth results in people doubling down on denial or going straight to reactionary violence against women.

Don’t be scared of Promising Young Woman. As it’s directed by a woman there is no revisiting of the rape trauma or scenes that could be pornified by sick men. It is a beautiful, colorful, funny, witty, film. All the actors who participated get feminist brownie points.

Gretel & Hansel (2020)

This is a folk horror movie by two men. Written by Rob Hayes and directed by Oz Perkins. It stays pretty true to the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, but with a very feminist bent. Gretel is a young teen with a little brother whose unstable mother kicks them out after their father dies because he left them all in absolute poverty. Teenage Gretel has to dodge rapey old men and crazy violent old men. She quickly realizes how vulnerable she is in the world of men without her parents.

The witch’s cottage isn’t made of gingerbread and candy, but it is warm and welcoming and food mysteriously appears on the table each day. The children see the old single woman who lives there as their rescuer. A respite from the dangerous world. She takes care of the children and starts teaching them how to survive in the world. Once Gretel stops being suspicious and considers staying long term, things start to change. The woman pretty much admits to Gretel that she is a witch and starts apprenticing Gretel to become one. She starts talking trash about men to Gretel and starts suggesting that Gretel’s brother isn’t Gretel’s responsibility and that she should send him to the woodcutters to raise.

In the film a witch is purposely defined as a powerful woman who is child free and doesn’t entertain men. Most men’s fear. How do you control a woman who sits in her own power and can’t be subdued via childbearing and domestic labour? The witch reveals to Gretel that she gained her power by eating her own children. As soon as she ate them her fingers turned black and she gained unnatural power. The witch tries to force Gretel to eat her brother to become like her. She thinks she is saving Gretel from misogyny. But, as in the fairy tale, Gretel kills the witch and saves her brother. In a twist ending Gretel does take the witch’s advice, however, that she isn’t her brother’s mother and he isn’t her responsibility. She sends him to the woodcutters. As soon as he is out of sight, her fingers turn black marking her as a witch. Then the film ends.

Gretel & Hansel is a film about how women who shun traditional female roles of caregiving, domestic labour, and living with misogyny’s boot on their neck are ostracized by society and treated as unnatural and evil. It is about the resentment of women towards their children and how motherhood can be a dark burden rather than the sunshine and rainbows women are fed about motherhood. It may be dark folk horror, but it’s never blatantly gorey. It’s subtle psychological terror. The sets, costumes, and cinematography are very beautiful, minimalist, and original. They alone make this worth the watch.

Men (2022)

If you can’t handle body horror, I’d skip this one. It’s worth it though to see a film by a male director and writer (Alex Garland) so accurately portray the horror of what it is like to live as a woman in a misogynistic world. Garland is known for the feminist themes in his films like Ex Machina. Before he’s been very subtle, but in Men he uses a sledgehammer to show men how sh*t they are. Jesse Buckley plays Harper, a woman trying to escape to the country to heal after a traumatic experience with her husband. The trauma is revealed through flashbacks and not fully explained until the end of the film.

Harper’s husband starts to act controlling and abusive. It scares her and she tells him she wants a divorce. His response is to hit her so hard she falls down. She immediately kicks him out of their apartment and yells that it’s definitely over now and he’s not welcome back. Not handling rejection well, he then breaks into the apartment above theirs, and tries to climb the balconies to get back into the apartment where Harper is. He fails and falls in front of her eyes and ends up dead, impaled on the fencing below. It’s not addressed, but if he had made it back into their apartment he would likely have killed her. Her character deals with a lot of survivor’s guilt when she should be feeling relief.

An undetermined amount of time in the future, she rents a country home to get away and get over it, but every man she meets in the rural village is kind of creepy —each one creepier than the next. Then you realize they all share the same face. Each of Harper’s interactions with a man is a real experience women have all the time, but the director turns those moments into horror simply by using the woman’s point of view backed with eerie music.

By the time Harper realizes all the men are the same, they all coalesce upon her trying to break into the country house. When she stops running and confronts them they turn into an amorphous blob and each man gives birth to the next and the next. Until the blob turns into her dead husband and we realize the film is a ghost story and Harper is being haunted by her sh*tty, abusive, dead husband the whole time. She asks him what he wants from her, and he simply answers that he wants her to love him. She makes a face, doesn’t respond, and just leaves the house and her pregnant friend is there to pick her up. That’s it, finis.

What does the creepy but simple ending mean? To me, her dead husband’s words sum up men’s bullsh*t. “Love me, love me!” The monster cried. “Love me even though I’m a monster. Lie to me that I’m not a monster. Love me unconditionally no matter what I do or say. Love me while I beat you. Love me while I crush your soul. Love me while I’m strangling you to death!”

Men want us to pretend they aren’t monsters and that we don’t have to constantly walk on eggshells around them so we don’t get yelled at, beaten, raped, or murdered. The character of Harper says no to this ancient devil’s bargain and represents all the modern women who refuse it today. The film is about the harsh and often violent backlash women receive from men and the whole of society for rejecting this devil’s bargain.

Don’t Worry Darling (2022)

Directed by Olivia Wilde, this film is a modern twist on The Stepford Wives. Alice, played by Florence Pugh, lives in a 1950s utopian community of only married couples. Each day the husbands go to work for the mysterious “Victory Project” while the wives stay in the community cooking, cleaning, doing childcare, and taking ballet classes. The community is centered on its enigmatic founder played by Chris Pine who gives off cult leader vibes and uses a lot of vague finance bro terminology. He takes a special liking to Alice’s husband Jack, played by Harry Styles.

When one of the wives becomes unstable, Alice starts to grow suspicious of the community and starts asking questions. Everyone gaslights her —except for the founder. He privately reveals that her concerns are founded and goads her to keep digging and to “challenge” him. She calls him out for it in front of the neighborhood but he gaslights her when in front of others. When alone with her husband Jack she asks him to leave the community. He agrees, but then as soon as they get to the car he starts shouting that he’s sorry as men in red jumpsuits carry her away and take her somewhere for shock therapy.

During the therapy Alice starts to remember the truth. The truth is that it’s not the 1950s, it’s modern day. Alice is really a doctor and Jack is really an unemployed loser. He can’t keep a job and she has to work more and more shifts to cover the bills to make up for his ineptitude at life. She comes home from long shifts to him complaining that he didn’t eat and expects her to cook him dinner while he was on the internet all day.

Speaking of being on the internet all day, Jack goes down a reddit red pill rabbit hole and finds cult leader Chris Pine who has created a virtual reality for men who want the “trad wife” fantasy. All of the wives in the utopian community are actually immobile bodies restrained in their homes. They aren’t aware the community is virtual and that their bodies are rotting away in the real world. “All members are responsible for the physical upkeep of their wives” (like these losers would keep their enslaved wives in any kind of decent state of hygiene). The women are imprisoned against their will and brainwashed in the virtual reality program so they aren’t aware of it. The irony is that when the husbands leave the community each morning to go to work, they are actually going to work in the real world to be able to pay the monthly fees for the virtual community. The losers who couldn’t keep a job can suddenly be hard workers when it means their wives are docile slaves and their children are computer programs who can be switched off.

As Alice becomes aware of her situation, Jack panics and tries to keep her from running away. She smashes a glass over his head, accidentally killing him. Only one of the wives is aware of the scam and finds Alice with the body. She tells Alice if the men die in the community, they die in the real world and Jack won’t be able to force her back into the program now that he’s dead. She tells Alice how to escape and to do it fast before they find her in the real world and kill her to silence her. Queue all the men panicking and trying to stop Alice. If she gets out, their illegal program is busted.

My favourite scene is when the cult leader’s wife, who’s been the biggest pickme so far, overhears her husband’s panicked phone call describing how Alice can escape and she immediately stabs him in the chest to free herself.

I wish the film had been half in the utopia and half in the real world showing Alice’s escape and the freeing of the other women, but it ends when she wakes up. A lot of people didn’t like the twist ending, but I laughed so hard at it being a feminist baseball bat swinging at all the loser men of preddit.

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Do you have any feminist favorites to add? Please do! I’m always looking for more films to watch that aren’t male fantasies.