Please note this post will contain brief discussions of sexual assault and abuse.
As the movie industry contends with the MeToo movement and the harms its own have committed, many filmmakers have taken on the contentious issue through their cinematic work. From Promising Young Woman to Revenge, stories of abuse and the women who survive it (or otherwise) has been an unavoidably enormous aspect of the late 2010s and early 2020s in cinema.
Which brings me to She Will, the 2021 feature debut of Charlotte Colbert, which is one of the movies that has most explicitly contended with this issue as it relates to film specifically. She Will follows Veronica Ghent (Alice Krige), a one-time movie star who found early success via an intimate collaboration with a much older director (Malcolm McDowell), as she travels to the Highlands of Scotland to recuperate after a mastectomy. Joined by her nurse, Desi (Kota Eberhardt), Ghent soon discovers connection with the history of the land as she navigates her complex relationship with her one-time collaborator and her own shifting sense of self.
She Will, as you’d expect from a visual artist like Colbert, is a strange, striking, and evocative movie – Krige , magnetic, serves as a sort of grounding force in the surreal backdrop of the Scottish Highlands, almost elemental, as she gets down in the ash and mud to paint or wanders through the forest barefoot in a dream state. As someone who grew up in this part of the world, I can confirm that it really is just as weird as this, though I rarely see it captured on film – the pervading sense of history that seems to settle over everything, even against a more modern backdrop.
And it’s that history which really, for me, elevates She Will as a post-MeToo story. Colbert weaves the history of women’s oppression (particularly via witchcraft) through the story, using the close connections in the landscape to lend these details a little more vitality and life – the setting almost feels like another world entirely, separate from the one that Ghent experienced her abuse in, memories of her relationship with the director flickering in and out as strangely as those of the women from centuries past. Colbert draws on common ground between the generations of women – the paranoia, accusations, and blame placed on victims of men’s crimes – to find connective tissue between these stories, and even to offer some vengeance as Ghent finally takes revenge for the harm caused to her at the hands of a person who should have protected her.
She Will approaches the topic of abuse within the film industry sideways, drawing on parallels with women’s oppression over the centuries to deliver a convincing and cathartic story about what it means to survive and live with the consequences. If you’ve seen She Will, what was your interpretation of the story, and where do you think it stands amongst other films in the post-MeToo era? Let me know in the comments!
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By Louise MacGregor
(header image via Los Angeles Times)
No But Listen 