My Favorite Movies 2025 Edition, part 8 – 9-5

Today’s magic word is ‘trauma’.

9. The Vvitch: A New England Folktale (Robert Eggers, 2015, USA)

A family is forced to leave their colony in New England over religious differences and find their own settlement away from the few benefits of civilization they had before. Soon, their baby disappears right from under the eyes of the eldest daughter. This leads to strife and mistrust within the family, as their father tries to maintain control of the situation with little effect. All the while, we know there is in fact the titular witch in the forest.

Thomasin, the eldest daughter, is silently blamed for what happened to the baby. She is a young beautiful woman, so she is both powerless and seen as a conduit of all evil by the religious zealots around her. I have spoken on this previously (see Belladonna of Sadness and Hagazussa), but there was an author who saw witchcraft as the only possible escape from the patriarchy of feudalism. Well, feudalism might be mostly over by the era in which this movie happens (and never reached North America as far as I understand it), but that only led to another form of oppression, where witchcraft was used as an excuse for killing any woman, who dared to exhibit any kind of autonomy. So, is it any wonder that Thomasin ends up joining the witch in the forest by the end of the movie? And of course, the witches are naked, because that’s what these evil women would do in the minds of the patriarchy of the time and female sexuality was monstrous in itself. I’m not saying the movie is misogynistic here, but it is depicting attitudes from the past, that were misogynistic.

All in all, it is hard to say what’s real and what is just religious mania or children’s imagination. It seems obvious that their situation combined with their harsh views on religion could easily lead them to overinterpret basically anything they encounter in their lives, which would otherwise be quite monotone.

Part of the problem is that the patriarch of the family seems kind of incompetent. This was actually common among the early settlers, as they were often fairly rich (otherwise you couldn’t afford the journey) and moved away from religious persecution only to find out that they couldn’t just buy themselves out of any problems, because there was no-one to sell them anything, which often caused the poor within their community to have to take on even more work with even less reward.

When things go against you all the time and you are deeply religious in this puritan way, who do you blame? Obviously there must be some dark force lurking around. Why else wouldn’t their work be rewarded by their deity.

Another point of view, regarding patriarchy, is that Thomasin is old enough to bear children, so why isn’t she doing that? Yes, that should be women’s own choice, but that is not the way the people, who try to enforce the patriarchy see things. In their mind, the women should be birthing the next generation as soon as possible. There’s an infamous video of Nick Fuentes talking about his plans for marriage. He plans to wait until he is old enough (I think he says 34) to find a young wife (underaged, that is). Why would anyone, who wants a nice, equal relationship, purposefully try to find a wife, who is much less powerful? Well, that just isn’t what they want. So, when a woman dares to do something different with her life, she is seen as a threat. A witch, if you will.

Puritanism brings its own problems. Thomasin is already convinced that she is a sinner, even though her sins are all meaningless ones like thought crimes and idleness, even though she clearly takes part in the work at their little farm. Puritans were initially people, who were not happy with the reforms by the Anglican church and wanted to take what little fun there was in life. I mean, when they did hold political power in England, they forbade Christmas.

The Puritan attitudes of the father are also infecting the children. They police each other in ways children shouldn’t. It’s just constant surveillance for people, who need a little freedom to grow into a read adulthood, but at the same time, they do also lack the community around them to help in this. There’s a constant reminder that the older children are becoming sexual beings in a situation where there are no potential mates.

Then there’s the forest. It is clearly presented in the movie as something to fear. We often get quick flashes of the forest looming over the farm. This plays into the fears of many people regarding the unknown nature. This doesn’t quite work for me, as to us Finns the forest is just another home. Within the movie, it’s a place where you don’t go unless it’s absolutely necessary. The father and the oldest son only dwell there after it becomes clear that they can’t grow enough crops to hold them through the winter.

Thomasin was Anya Taylor-Joy’s first big role on screen and it is a wonderful start for her. She is very beautiful, but in a weird, otherworldly way, which works well in this context and by no means do I mean that in a negative way. She has been cast in similar roles later on in her career for a reason (see New Mutants, Northman, one of which almost made this list, but no points for guessing which one). Maybe she is a changeling or something, but I don’t really find her menacing (although she can do that as well).

8. Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999, USA)

Our unnamed protagonist finds himself in an existential crisis. Nothing in his life seems to give him any real comfort. This has lead to insomnia, which worsens the problem as he feels he is in a continuous haze. Then, on a work trip, he meets Tyler on a plane and together they discover a new world or rediscover an old world of masculinity, which then just turns more and more toxic as they preach their new philosophy to a growing audience of disaffected men. However, it turns out that Tyler has been doing all of this on a much grander scale than expected all of this time and has even bigger plans.

Our protagonist seems to have a pretty good grasp on the problems of modern society, but instead of finding constructive ways of fixing those, he chooses to be destructive. Tyler’s explanation for this approach is basically something primal inside of men, which has been suppressed by society. It just happens that this idea of what masculinity is about just isn’t based on anything real. We are and always have been primarily very social animals and that kind of toxicity just doesn’t really fit into what we are. Or, at least if it is genetic, those genes would have died out a long time ago, as those are the males are the most likely to die in battles.

I guess the discussion regarding toxic masculinity and this movie’s role in those circles has somewhat soured this movie for me, but I didn’t lower it that many spots, because I read this movie very differently from those sources. To me this is an indictment of toxic masculinity, not a defense. These men can’t fix anything. They just cause chaos. Not that bringing down credit institutions wouldn’t be nice (except that the way they did it wouldn’t really work, but still).

The woman in the story is quite toxic herself, but when things get out of control, she seems normal in comparison, and for our protagonist, she doesn’t hold much value besides the sex and in this case, there isn’t even an attempt to procreate. Did certain parts of manosphere just copy this idea of a woman for their own purposes?

You can see how this might have influenced the manosphere, but at the same time, can authors really be held responsible for people not being able to read their message? I guess to a point, but I don’t see how this movie could possibly make the protagonist or his group something to strive to be. What we don’t want to do is bring everything down to the lowest common denominator. Are we not allowed to have art, because certain people don’t get it? Which would be difficult, because there are a lot of people, who don’t get it, even if the ‘it’ is staring them right in the face.

I don’t think the message of the film is positive in any way. These men are giving away their freedom in order to achieve freedom. It doesn’t really work that way, unless you have a really fucked up idea of what freedom is, but apparently many people nowadays do. Freedom, for so many people, is currently just the lack of everything they don’t like.

People know there’s something wrong in the world, but don’t really know who to point fingers at, because deep down they know where the problem is, but they just can’t acknowledge it, because it would go so hard against their own identity. So, if the powerful tell them to hate trans-people or anything woke, they will not question that, because it gives them an out. It’s easier to hate the jews than the capitalist system, which will supposedly help you, as long as you let it work properly, which just doesn’t seem to happen, because of bad actors.

The problem is that the system encourages people to become bad actors. If you manage to get into a position of power, you can then use the system to make the world a worse place to your own benefit. Who is going to stop you?

I guess in this way Tyler was a hero. He tried to take down this system. On the other hand, his way is a problem, because it leaves so many people without protection from society. How many people would die, if they can’t get their medicine? How many hundreds of millions would die, if the infrastructure breaks down and society can’t provide everyone living in cities with food and water?

Yes, Tyler’s plan does have some appeal, but if you think about it for more than a few seconds, you begin to realize how much suffering he would cause just to make the world a little better for the few people behind him, and they probably couldn’t live through the ensuing chaos either (survivalists are notoriously bad at actually surviving.) In the end, Tyler, despite his “philosophy” is just indulging in his own fantasies. Despite his apparent aloofness, he craves the adoration of the men around him. He is a sigma role model only because the people adoring him have no understanding of the character.

Tyler Durden stole the potential for personal growth and liberation from those around him. Somehow, because of lack of media literacy, he has also stolen it from so many men.

Despite this, as of this writing, Fight Club is the number 3 inspirational movie of all time to “energize healthy habits” according to Rotten Tomatoes. That seems… weird.

7. 4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile (4 Month, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days) (Cristian Mungiu, 2007, Romania)

Of all the movies on the list, this is one of the easier ones to find a feminist point of view.

In the waning days of Ceaucescu’s rule of Romania in 1987, just a couple of years before his fall, abortion is highly illegal. But people still need them, so Otilia is trying to arrange one for her friend Gabita. That means criminal activity with people, who are not the most ethical in the world.

I’m old enough to remember all of this. I was 11 or 12 when Ceaucescu’s rule finally ended in a revolution, which led to his and his wife’s execution. I even have vague memories of the images that were being broadcast from Romania.

Why was abortion illegal? Was Ceaucescu deeply religious? No. He wanted babies to sell to the west. He didn’t care when the weird growth became a human, nor how good their lives would be after birth. Actually, he used the poor conditions these babies were put into as a marketing tool.

Women or people with wombs were even inspected regularly for signs of pregnancy just so they wouldn’t get abortions illegally, because they would have been caught. Did abortions stop? Obviously not. People will risk it, because the end result of a pregnancy will also have huge consequences. The process just becomes much more dangerous or even horrific.

And, kind of obviously, people with wombs are going to take the hit for this policy. Abortions become harder acquire, more expensive, you have to deal with criminals and if something goes wrong, the consequences of that are going to be much worse.

In this particular case, both of the women are raped. Can they report that? No. They would just end up in prison, while the culprit probably wouldn’t get caught, and if he did, he might not even get as long a sentence as the women. Can they tell their boyfriends? In most cases, probably not. So, they just have to take it while going through another extremely traumatic experience. They are forced to be pragmatic about it, choosing to wash themselves after the fact, because otherwise there’s a risk of pregnancy and they would be on square zero again. Actually, Otilia is so pragmatic about it, one wonders whether this has happened before.

And this is before the operation, which Gabi must still endure and Otilia is still present for that as well.

This is the kind of thing we should be over with as a society, but clearly aren’t. Let people be in control over their bodies. What is so hard about that?

But obviously, the theme doesn’t in itself make a great movie. What makes this great is how viscerally the movie is able to depict Otilia’s journey through all of this. There’s a scene in which Otilia is sitting at a dinner table. It’s pretty simple, but extremely effective. She is trying to keep herself together among her boyfriend’s family she has just met, and this is right after she was raped.

Yet, she can’t talk about this to anyone, because you never know who you can trust. She also has to try to stay above all suspicions, because of the way these situations are dealt with by the authorities.

On the other hand, the solidarity among women seems to be strong. Gabi is not a good person to work with here. She messes up things and tries to make sure Otilia has to figure it out. And Otilia stays with Gabi until the end, even though Gabi is obviously taking advantage of her friendship in ways she shouldn’t. You could say Otilia is loyal to a fault, but at the same time, Otilia does know Gabi needs her help despite everything.

Also, you can easily point out other feminist talking points. When Otilia is trying to arrange a hotel room for them, she is immediately assumed to be a prostitute. Gabi doesn’t want to have the baby, because she knows her life will basically be over, as she can’t finish her studies and a child would be a huge financial burden without a husband. Or she could marry the father, but maybe that wasn’t what she was planning to do. One should not get married just because of an accident.

This movie is a testament to how you can make a great movie with little resources. This was from 2007, but looks much older. This might have been deliberate, but I (and this might be a bit racist) assume its because they just didn’t have the most modern equipment available to them. Although, it might have very well been deliberate as well, as it does look sort of like an 80s movie, which would fit the period it happened in.

I wonder how this movie would affect the pro-life crowd? Would they just choose to be obtuse and not change their views? Would they just see the women in the movie as evil and assume they are getting what they asked for? I’m afraid so. The problem is that the situation is getting even worse in the US in some areas. You could get a few years in prison in Romania for having undergone an abortion, but a few years ago, in the US, they were talking of actual murder charges, as if society can benefit from putting these, very harmless people, in prison for the rest of their lives.

Abortions are not a common theme in movies. Its not an easy topic. On the other hand, the few movies on the topic have been good. They have managed to approach the topic with sympathy and have been able to find different points of view. There’s Vera Drake, a movie about a woman, who just provides a necessary, but illegal service to women in 50s UK and gets into trouble for it, and there’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always about about a teen girl in the US, who needs to go to another state to get an abortion. Both are definitely worth a watch. I know there’s also Call Jane, a movie about a network of women, based on a true story, who arranged abortions, but I haven’t seen it and I’ve heard it isn’t that good.

For the record, this is the highest placed movie on this list that passes the Bechdel test. (And yes, I do understand that it was originally just a joke on the male-centric way movies are made, but I also do think that joke has a lot of merit and, as good jokes should, incorporates an interesting message.)

6. La passion de Jeanne d'Arc (Passion of Joan of Arc) (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928, France)

In 1431, Joan of Arc is being accused of heresy. She will not recant her claim that she was assigned by God to drive the English from French soil, so she is threatened with torture and death penalty in order to coax her into signing a confession.

Well, you should have known all that already.

I think this was in 2022, when there was a play advertised in London, which used they/them pronouns for Joan. Obviously, the right was furious about this. As if it wasn’t kind of obvious that Joan of Arc was gender-nonconforming. And when I say “kind of” I mean “very”. How many women wore armor in the 15th century? That should have been a clue. There’s actually an article on this on Wikipedia and plenty of people have clearly studied this topic.

Obviously, the right-wingers didn’t really care about the logic behind this. They just wanted the attention for raging about this. Still, Joan is a good example of gender-nonconforming historically, something the right-wingers always claim to be a recent phenomenon. (Although I’m going to use the feminine ‘she’ here, because we can only speculate and I do want to emphasize her being female here, because I do believe it played a role in these events and especially in why we still remember her existing at all. On the other hand, if I knew she would rather have used something else, I would follow her wishes. It should be noted that there are credible people from various disciplines who do seem to believe we should regard Joan as masc-identifying trans).

The thing is, many cultures have gender-nonconformity in some way or another as an accepted part of life. Others have had it even if it wasn’t accepted. It just wasn’t documented very well, because you don’t document your secret life in a way that would help others find out about it. I mean, just look at what happened to Joan. Her forsaking of traditional gender roles was definitely part of why she ended up on trial for heresy specifically.

Guess who did document it? The right-wingers of the day. The problem was that they didn’t really understand it any better back then than they do now. And while they try to mask their hate in seemingly scientific bullshit (even though actual science disagrees with them), their poor rhetoric is still pretty much the same as it was then. Especially that of people like Matt Walsh, who is just openly a Christian fascist, even going so far as to call himself that.

If people like him had the power to do so, would they go as far as the judges here? They have pretty much shown by this point that they don’t care if someone who steps out of line suffers or even dies.

Joan’s death is as much a warning to others than a punishment. The message is clear: everyone should stay where they were born. Of course, this wasn’t only a gender thing, it was also about class. Joan was born as a peasant in small village. You can’t let those get out of line either. Aspiration was not allowed. In fact, when she is burned alive, the locals riot. They had no interest in killing her.

Considering that part of her crime is the gender-nonconformity, it is ironic that as part of the process, her hair, which is commonly seen as an indicator of gender, was shaved. Not that it was very long to begin with.

I can’t claim I really know medieval Catholicism, but I would also venture a guess that Joan’s religious views were also a threat. The church was an authority on a level we probably find hard to understand in these more (gladly) secular times. The church held a monopoly on truth about the world. That’s pretty huge. Much of the movie is a bunch of priests acting as her judges interrogating her specifically about her religious views.

In actuality and while the whole situation was very much politically motivated, Joan was tried for witchcraft. This was before those trials flared up in the late 15th century partly due to the publication of Malleus Maleficarum, but they had been around for millenia. Trying someone for witchcraft might as well be read as being tried for nonconforming.

For some reason in the movie, the younger priests are more sympathetic to Joan, but are quickly shut down by their elders, if they seem to even consider acting upon their sympathies. I wonder if there was a point Dreyer was trying to make here.

The movie itself is an early masterpiece. The close-ups of Joan have been deeply imprinted on my brain and Dreyer uses many expressionist techniques to explain Joan’s dire situation. While the story of Joan of Arc is or at least should be familiar to many in the west, this goes into detail about a certain part of the whole story in a very interesting way, even if it doesn’t capture everything, but that’s not the point. The point is to understand her situation in all of this and from that point of view, it just works.

5. You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay, 2017, United Kingdom)

Joe is a traumatized veteran. He is desensitized to violence to such an extent that he has no qualms about using it for his work, which is rescuing missing girls. You know what I mean, but for Google’s sake I have to avoid using the real words (although I don’t know why I’m getting careful now after using many words search engines hate in this series). Anyhow, during one of these gigs, he stumbles upon a conspiracy, which puts him into danger personally. And this isn’t your regular thriller. This is that thriller with all the unbelievable elements sawed off and certain edges deliberately sanded down.

This is a brutal movie. Joe does not shy away from doing whatever is necessary to get the job done. On the other hand, at times we are allowed to remove ourselves from the action. Actually, all action is shot in a way that keeps us at a distance. There’s always this additional barrier, whether it’s seeing the scene through security cameras or some sound distancing us from what’s going on even in the most vicious situations. “You Were Never Really Here.”

For example, at one point we see Joe going from room to room in a brothel full of young girls. He is looking for a specific girl and doesn’t stop to help others, but he still needs to make sure the men in these rooms don’t cause problems. We see Joe storm into a room, come back out, followed by a girl in a night gown staggering into the hallway. That girl is left to fend for herself.

Joe is contradictory in this way. I don’t think he would be in this line of work, if he didn’t really care for the girls, but at the same time he can remove himself from the situation emotionally and just leave other girls behind without thinking twice about it. I guess being passive is slightly above actively making these girls your playthings from a moral point of view, but it isn’t really heroic either.

This is also a bleak world from the point of view of conspiracies. Powerful people of this movie gather together to abuse children. I don’t think the QAnon bullshit was very prominent at this point in 2017 (although Pizzagate started in 2016), when this movie came out, but it must have been close. Still, it is those worlds where something is happening right under our noses, behind closed doors. That is a very paranoid place to be.

Joe is not doing well in other ways as well. He often contemplates self-harm in one way or another, even going so far as to asphyxiate himself. Flashbacks to the horrors of war are not helping him in this regard either. Nor do his memories of his abusive father, who tried to instill his own toxic masculinity into Joe and succeeded, leaving Joe the empty husk he is.

The only anchor to the world beyond his work and his horrific memories, is his elderly mother, with whom he lives. She is quite infirm and Joe doesn’t seem to allow her to leave their apartment, going so far as to lock her in. This does mean that if something happens to Joe in the line of his duties, she will die a slow death, as they aren’t exactly neighborly.

There is a certain kind of existential horror here. We are helpless against these powerful people, who do as they please even at the cost of our children. I don’t think Ramsay is trying to sell us on those conspiracies as this is based on a novella and that would be quite a shallow interpretation of the movie. The movie feels more like a deconstruction of a revenge film. Sort of reminds me of Blue Rain, but is just willing to go so much further into the darkness within Joe. Also, since the motivation is not revenge, the movie has somewhere to go rather than just sputter out as those movies tend to.

While I do like the movie (clearly, based on it’s very high position on this list), I do find it very taxing, but that is also a good thing. Even though in general I’m able to distance myself from the “misery porn” of these movies, it does get hard, when the movie’s point is to delve into the torment of a badly traumatized man and make it worse by having him continuously confront the child abuse as an important piece of his existence. Movies often have to go very far in order for my dead soul to feel anything. This definitely does that.

Somehow I feel this movie captures the era in a way mainstream movies can’t (although, on IMDb this movie has more votes than Paddington 2, The Florida Project and Cars 3, but that might just be based on the user preferences rather than actual real world activity), but it’s more like there are people, who wish they could be Joe out of misguided understanding of the world. The same people probably voted for Trump (unless they are too paranoid to vote) despite his proven Epstein connections.

Personally, I’m much more interested in Joe’s personal drama and the way the story is told than the conspiracy stuff. Actually, the conspiracy feels more like a regrettable theme than anything else, because of the environment we were in and in many ways still are.

In one scene, Joe has just shot a man, who was part of a duo that killed Joe’s mother. The man is bleeding out on the floor and starts to sing along to a song on the radio. Joe lays down next to him and starts to sing as well. It might be my favorite scene of all time.

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