Judy & Punch

Aus­tralian actor Mir­rah Foulkes has per­formed for a clutch of her country’s most inter­est­ing exports, hav­ing appeared in Julia Leigh’s Sleep­ing Beau­ty and hus­band David Michôd’s Ani­mal King­dom, as well as Kiwi direc­tor Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake. She steps behind the cam­era for her first fea­ture as writer/​director in order to sub­vert a British cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion: the Punch and Judy pup­pet show.

With its roots in Italy, Punch and Judy’s first iter­a­tion in the UK was doc­u­ment­ed in 1664 by the diarist Samuel Pepys and has endured to this day as a form of fam­i­ly enter­tain­ment, which is curi­ous when you con­sid­er the basic premise: a deranged pup­pet beat­ing oth­er char­ac­ters with a stick fol­lowed by the self-sat­is­fied punch­line, ​“That’s the way to do it!” In recent years coun­cils have stepped in to pre­vent this show being per­formed at schools, con­cerned that Punch is not a good role mod­el for impres­sion­able young minds.

Foulkes does bal­anced work here, both retain­ing the ingre­di­ents of her source mate­r­i­al and melt­ing them down into a twist­ed live-action fairy tale that is dis­tinc­tive­ly her own, with the mag­nif­i­cent Mia Wasikows­ka act­ing with poised fury as Judy, a female avenger of male vio­lence. Wel­come to the fic­tion­al 17^th cen­tu­ry town of Sea­side, where mud min­gles with the blood of women hung as witch­es, all sent to the gal­lows by the bay­ing mob who rule the place. It is here that Punch (Damon Her­ri­man) and Judy per­form their mar­i­onette show, he cel­e­brat­ed as the star crafts­man even though she is tru­ly pulling the strings.

Their domes­tic life is coloured by an omi­nous sense of impend­ing vio­lence. It’s for good rea­son that Her­ri­man has played mur­der-incit­ing cult leader Charles Man­son twice this year (in Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood and Mind­hunter). His tiny eyes in a dev­il­ish face are cou­pled with a seething twitch­i­ness, as Punch broods on thwart­ed ambi­tions and fails to stay sober or look after the couple’s baby. Judy does not heed the tick­ing-time-bomb ener­gy of her hus­band, chastis­ing him for his laps­es in respon­si­bil­i­ty. One day, he does some­thing acci­den­tal­ly awful, and com­pounds it with some­thing crim­i­nal­ly terrible.

From here, the genre bends from claus­tro­pho­bic domes­tic dra­ma to full-on fan­ta­sy revenge fable. Foulkes bides her time before deal­ing out ret­ribu­tive jus­tice, draw­ing out the details of her deli­cious­ly dark world. There is absurd humour to be found in François Tétaz’s vaude­vil­lian score, which under­lines the very worst moments with brassy cheek. Adele Flere’s art direc­tion estab­lish­es Sea­side as a the­atri­cal­ly nasty town, con­trast­ing it with an almost super­nat­ur­al, earthy force ema­nat­ing from the sur­round­ing forest.

There are sto­ry arc com­par­isons to be made with French direc­tor Coralie Fargeat’s blood-soaked rape-revenge film Revenge, as both are geared towards pro­vid­ing a cathar­tic finale of a woman turn­ing the tables on her male oppres­sor. While on one lev­el Judy & Punch is that sim­ple, its sophis­ti­ca­tion is found in Foulkes com­mit­ment to cre­at­ing a lay­ered and sym­bol-rich tone poem, syn­the­sis­ing all the ele­ments of cin­e­ma to cre­ate a ghoul­ish ode to female ingenuity.