Prevenge | Little White Lies

Pre­venge

08 Feb 2017 / Released: 10 Feb 2017

Words by David Jenkins

Directed by Alice Lowe

Starring Alice Lowe, Jo Hartley, and Kate Dickie

A person wearing a sinister-looking mask with a large grinning mouth and painted-on eyes, dressed in a red hooded jacket.
A person wearing a sinister-looking mask with a large grinning mouth and painted-on eyes, dressed in a red hooded jacket.
3

Anticipation.

As an actor, Alice Lowe has become a sign of quality. But can she direct?

4

Enjoyment.

Hells yes. A genuinely grotesque and original idea that never panders to genre expectation.

4

In Retrospect.

The ending is a doozy. Roll on film number two.

Alice Lowe explores the hor­rors of mater­ni­ty in this black­ly com­ic riff on Rosemary’s Baby.

How­ev­er much you might try to cooly down­play it with gift show­ers, hope­ful smiles and Baby on Board’ badges, preg­nan­cy is an all-con­sum­ing state of phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal muta­tion. A life­time spent look­ing out for num­ber one no longer applies, as a woman, for around nine months, lit­er­al­ly exists as two bod­ies. She has to account for the tiny needs of the per­son grow­ing inside.

Like a con­tem­po­rary, dark­ly com­ic riff on Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, writer/​director and star Alice Lowe chan­nels the copi­ous anx­i­eties that come with child­birth into a quaint urban slash­er yarn. She is excep­tion­al as Ruth, an enig­mat­ic moth­er-to-be who is dri­ven to mur­der by a squeaky, sweary voice ema­nat­ing from her swelling baby bump.

She returns to her greyscale hotel room and lounges on her bed, lap­top flipped open as she rewatch­es a sequence from Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1934 noir, Crime With­out Pas­sion, in which a woman in wav­ing chif­fon robes floats towards the cam­era, wail­ing like a ban­shee. She assumes new per­sonas for each high­ly tar­get­ed kill, and yet Lowe man­ages to cre­ate a sad­sack base char­ac­ter who retains a mea­sure of empa­thy through the thick mist of blood and gore.

A person wearing a sinister-looking mask with a large grinning mouth and painted-on eyes, dressed in a red hooded jacket.

Where Pre­venge clev­er­ly ticks off a list of stock trau­mas that come from the birthing process, it comes into its own as an furi­ous polit­i­cal jere­mi­ad against the ways in which women are too often sup­pressed social­ly and pro­fes­sion­al­ly on gen­der grounds. Though the film wears its fem­i­nism light­ly, its all the more tren­chant for that rel­a­tive sub­tle­ty, lend­ing Ruth’s seedy ram­page a tinge of melan­choly. For­mal­ly, it’s a lit­tle rough around the edges, and the mechan­ics of each mur­der some­times lack for sophis­ti­ca­tion, but it nev­er­the­less charges along with a defi­ant bluster.

It’s quite some­thing for a debut fea­ture, and right out of the gates Lowe proves her­self to be a nat­ur­al direc­tor of actors, with not a sin­gle weak spot on the per­for­mance front.

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