Like blue cheese, hair dye, alcohol and a lot of other fun things, it is generally recommended that pregnant women avoid watching films in which a pregnant heroine ascribes malevolent powers to her unborn child. But screw that — such suppositions about the generalized sensitivities and sensibilities of the expectant mother are exactly what Alice Lowe‘s directorial debut “Prevenge” kicks against in such emphatic fashion. The actress and co-writer of Ben Wheatley‘s “Sightseers” wrote her film in a matter of weeks and shot it, with herself in the lead role, very soon after. And she’s terrific in the film, mordant and malevolent, deadpanning her way through its series of murders with the same damp suburban Britishness she brought to her role of the caravanning killer in “Sightseers.” But she did all that while seven months pregnant in real life (her “baby bump,” for want of a less nauseating term, is not a prosthesis), which not only makes her some sort of folk hero, it delivers a jolt of authenticity to her performance — it may be a farfetched serial-killer black comedy, but the weariness and wariness of pregnancy is real.
And yet the film is not just a metaphor (as are many pregnancy horrors and thrillers) for prepartum depression, it’s about depression and anxiety in general, isolation, and most of all, grief. That grief is the result of the non-accidental accident that means Ruth is facing parenthood alone. To reveal too much about it would spoil some of the film’s limited supply of intrigue, as it’s only gradually throughout that the fate of her partner, and the bearing it has on Ruth’s behavior, is brought to light. Suffice to say, it’s a slightly contrived-feeling event, reminiscent of the opening of Ian McEwan‘s “Enduring Love” in how it’s a tragedy that’s presented as a fable-like moral conundrum. (Oddly, that was not the only time McEwan came to mind — Ruth hears the malevolent, high-pitched voice of her baby goading her to kill and the British novelist’s latest book is apparently about a murder plot narrated from the perspective of a fetus in utero.)
Initially though, we know little about that — all we know is that a pregnant lady (Lowe), on the pretext of buying an exotic reptile for her son’s birthday, is poking around a pet store with its equally reptilian owner Mr. Zabek, who manages to work unsubtle sexual double entendres into almost everything he says. The woman, who’s seemed a dithery, nervy, mumsy type till now, produces a kitchen knife from her bag and slits his throat emotionlessly, under the swiveling eye of a nearby lizard.
The next person Ruth dispatches is the fantastically foul DJ Dan, a hulking sexist whom Ruth seeks out at a tragic ’70s disco in a pub, and who, in the cab on the way back to his place, vomits into his disco wig and then snogs her. Once in the house that he shares with his elderly, befuddled, exploited mother, Ruth asks a few more faux-admiring questions of him, and engages in a terrific impromptu rendering of the Nik Kershaw classic “Wouldn’t it be Good” before slicing him open in the groin region such that we see his testicles fall out and splat bloodily onto the carpet. This is as gruesome as the film gets, and it’s perverse and transgressive, deeply satisfying and very funny.
Because at this point we think we’ve got a handle on Ruth’s motivation, or lack thereof. The characterization of these two sleazes is such that she seems like a sociopathic avenging feminist on a murderous rampage, or as a Men’s Rights Activist would call her, “a feminist.” But her next victim is a woman (Kate Dickie), and the one after that a rather nice-seeming guy who offers her dinner and sympathy and whom she clearly likes, and so on. Turns out there is a method to her madness not just a pathology, and it’s actually marginally disappointing to discover. The film offers a logical if barmy explanation for her killing spree, yet Lowe is so good at conveying the classic all-out psychopath’s trick of making herself, despite her obvious pregnancy, into exactly what she needs to be to get close to her victims.
The story is interspersed with her visits to her midwife (Jo Hartley), a chirpily no-nonsense sort who is nonetheless prone to perhaps the greatest horror the movie contains: referring to the baby without the definite article as in “baby knows best” and “you have to think about baby now.” And baby is in control, or rather the pitch-shifted baby voice Ruth hears and takes orders from, in one of the less successful flourishes of Lowe’s script. She’s so strong as an actress that her tendency to overwrite as screenwriter is unfortunate — we really don’t need to hear the dialogue between her and the demon-baby to understand it. And it sometimes contributes to an on-the-nose feeling in which parallels are spelled out that would have been better left to the imagination. In general the unpolished feel of the film, reflected in the unlovely photographic style (DP Ryan Eddelston) and resolutely banal production design, is part of its charm, but it does lend a slight sense of rush (and we know the production was quick), with Lowe’s filmmaking craft not quite keeping pace with her fearless storytelling inventiveness.
Because uneven though it is, and downright shaggy at times, “Prevenge” is valuable in that it plots so unexpected an expectant-mother story — one in which pregnancy is actually ultimately minimized in terms of its impact on the story. It’s a revelation that only occurs to Ruth late on in the film, though it’s been so thoroughly hinted at throughout that the presentation of that realization as a kind of twist is another of the film’s slight stumbles. But what it means is quietly revolutionary: Like Lowe herself who didn’t allow her advanced pregnancy to stop her from doing something completely unrelated to it (writing, producing, directing and starring in a feature film), Ruth is a progressive character simply because she’s revealed to have stuff going on in her psyche other than the all-consuming full-time job of being pregnant, compared in the film to a “hostile takeover.”
Anything we can do to liberate the idea of pregnancy and motherhood from preordained notions of what it means for the woman involved, is a good thing. There is an idea that because pregnancy is a natural state, somehow nature takes over the woman’s body and mind for the duration and she runs on some sort of weird “natural” autopilot. And perhaps that’s partially true, but if so it’s also true that we should watch out for nature, because, in the memorable words of the casually profane Ruth, nature can be “a bit of cunt.” [B]
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