Once Upon A Time... in Hollywood

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood

Quentin Tarantino, 2019, USA-UK-China

(You shouldn’t read this if you haven’t seen, as it discusses major spoilers.)

And here’s another Tarantino film to be conflicted about.  I’ve noted many have wondered where its narrative is, but this time he has chosen mostly to be character-led than plot driven. Tarantino has always been as much about digressions as set-pieces, but here the former are dominant; or perhaps because for the most part even the set-pieces seem like digressions. There’s still conceit and indulgence but there is a more of a roaming, loose-limbed atmosphere without the feeling that set-pieces are just being stacked up. He’s always liked to cosset his characters and actors, so it’s perhaps surprising he hasn’t gone this route before.

These characters live in a vision of Hollywood derived from those anecdotes you find in autobiographies of golden eras of outrageous behaviour and washed-up stars. The mock-ups of TV shows of olden days and fabrication of an actor’s career are fun pastiches, and the rambling tone surely lets it breathe; I for one was happy to soak in the atmosphere. It’s probably baggy but with an immersive free-floating aesthetic. It’s reverential rather than critical or discerning. Also noteworthy here is that characters are less defined by Tarantino’s speechifying, where characters are talking at rather that with each other. I am of the opinion, and I have heard others say, that for its ether alone it is his most enjoyable beneath ‘Jackie Brown’.

But then there are the many red flags that I can’t quite reconcile.

Leonardo Di Caprio gives the most depth, playing a movie star who seems to be of average intelligence and talent, trying to stand against both his ego and insecurities. The moment where the precocious kid tells him he’s done the best acting she’s ever seen and the camera lingers on his tears which contain desperation, validation and relief is, for all the film’s bigger picture, its truest moment of pathos. Sometimes Tarantino is like a kiddie playing in the adult sandbox; sometimes he knows to hold a moment just right. The director’s voice is foremost – there is no doubt this is Once Upon  A Tarantino and his interview in ‘Sight & Sound’ conspicuously lapses into me-me-me: for example, when he says “that’s how I like to talk to people who are in my costumes” as if the work of Arianne Phillips didn’t exist*; or when he says that no one except him has spoken to an actor about a certain part before. But he casts so well that many weaknesses are passed over because the folks he casts know how to carry a movie. This has been true since his debut onwards.

For example, Brad Pitt pouts, sucks up celluloid and effortlessly charms even as he chills; his run-in with Manson’s clan is the tense highlight. The way he deals with the situation without ever doubting he can handle himself is just as much an indicator of his self-assurance as his scars and his run-in with Bruce Lee.

Counter to this, Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate is just a blast of sunshine, radiating warmth and disarming charm, the vibrant centre of the film, although she really doesn’t have any other dimensions. With Robbie’s radiance, that’s not a problem. Her visit to the cinema allows her to enjoy her success, but this isn’t so much an act of ego rather than experiencing the entertainment she gives to others. And in this scene, Tarantino’s fetishism for film and feet meet, Tate’s bare feet framed against the cinema screen. This becomes a love letter to Sharon Tate and would be even without the following revisionism. Even so - as a friend pointed out - it's like she's just paraded on and off as necessary, without any real depth, continuing her objectification.

Although he’s often done the “Boys Together” thing, I never had a sense of true misogyny from Tarantino; exploitation yes, but not toxic masculinity. But that was until ‘The Hateful Eight’ where the fact that the men are united and triumphant over the death and sadistic treatment of the sole woman was hugely problematic. And coming from the back of that, ‘Once Upon A Time…’ continues the trend (and this is not including the troubling behind-the-scenes footage of Uma Thurman’s car crash from ‘Kill Bill’). It’s not like Tarantino hasn’t invested and made several female pulp icons in his past, so his last two films seem like a regression. After all, ‘Inglorious Basterds’ contained a take-down of a Nazi “Nice Guy”, so he is previously engaged with such issues. Firstly, for what ends up a love letter to a woman, it’s male angst that takes centre stage. And as a love letter to Sharon Tate, as an objection to her appalling murder, here is a film whose sadism towards women takes up more screentime than the men. There’s an underage temptress who doesn’t need to be called Lolita because she’s called Pussy (yeah yeah, it’s “Pussycat”, but who are you fooling?). An underage sex gag; it’s not even innuendo. And even though Booth rebuffs her, later the camera will still do a heel-to-hot-pants pan up her legs. Perhaps it’s imitating exploitation’s male gaze, but in a modern context, that feels just an excuse: there is something notably ill-judged here.

The Bruce Lee encounter is the one scene that has come in for much criticism for being, at mildest, wrongheaded to outright racist. The fact that there are so many interpretations of this scene perhaps hints that it’s nowhere near a solid as intended. It certainly feels mistaken and unwarranted to portray Bruce Lee as arrogant, preening and laughable when he is the only ethnic representation of note. It may be taken from his actual quotes, but in the film’s context, it’s negative. As Tarantino is an obvious Lee fan, this seems odd: of course it would be wrong to see this as a realistic representation, but at the very least it feels unfair. Or a “cheap shot”, as Wendy Ide writes, also taking issue with the “the jarring scene featuring Damian Lewis as a polyester version of Steve McQueen”.

Perhaps Tarantino’s wisest choice is to treat Charlie Manson (Damon Harriman) briefly, to deny him any kind of platform. This is not his film. When the killers draw nearer, there is a sense of trepidation because nowhere has Tarantino previously shown that he is capable of tackling such a grim and delicate scene such as the truth of the Tate murders. Well, he doesn’t. As we follow Tate through the film, there is the sense of suspense and dread, but we needn’t worry.

I saw a Twitter comment where someone said he now looked forward to a cinematic rewriting of the Emmet Till murder and other racial injustices (quoting specific examples which I now ruefully forget, but there are too many to mention; the Emmet Till horror always sticks out for me). This comment was an admitted provocation by the commentator, but it still sheds light on Tarantino’s inability to quite see life outside the movies. He even filtered slavery through an absurdist Movie Western Cult Character called Django, undid any chilling veracity achieved in ‘Inglorious Basterds’ with a fantasy ending and, here, his whole sympathy is for an imaginary version of a film star. Not that that in itself is wrong, but just that he hasn’t quite been able to write himself out of total movie fandom aside, except for ‘Jackie Brown’ – written by Tarantino but taken from an Elmore Leonard novel – which feels hinged on something more real, a mature melancholy provided from its source. It’s where he insists on bringing his cinephilia into the real world that I find contention. But he still knows to linger on De Caprio’s tears.

Like ‘Inglorious Basterds’, having spent the first two thirds of the film working up a genuine emotional investment with its recreation of another time and place, the third act happily goes off the rails into something else. What emerges is another example of Tarantino rewriting history to avenge real past atrocities with movie violence (or literally with celluloid stock in ‘Inglorious Basterds’). But it doesn’t articulate a strong recognisable argument against the cult’s justification that they kill celebrities because they were taught to kill by their screens. Their delusion is intriguing but not investigated. Even a lesser film like ‘Child’sPlay’ (2019), for example, has its internal young audience recognise that the cartoon violence of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II’ is laughable, even if Chucky is taking the wrong message from it: they’re real and he’s not. It cannily presents a demarcation of audience and fantasy world. Rather, Tarantino offers a typical revenge fantasy without any question: is there any question that these guys deserve it? Therefore, anything is vindicated.

Our avatar for dishing out retribution is Cliff Booth, a wife killer… but she was apparently a nag and shrew and so *shrug*. The flashback to the wife killing is framed as a joke to which we already know the punchline. But anyway, Cliff Booth has previously been established as having kick-ass powers when he matches if not bests Bruce Lee. Where the rest of the audience seemed to be enjoying his laying waste to the cult – in the manner I recognise from audience laughing and applauding the absurdist violence in FrightFest, or which I experienced in ‘JohnWick: chapter 3 – Parabellum’ – there was I, equally as chilled by the acknowledgement that Booth was as loathsomely violent as had been hinted at throughout the film. But your interpretation may vary. It can also be read as Tarantino’s payback towards a younger generation that ended an Golden Era he idealises with their heinous crime.

And this final showdown too is set up like a comedy sketch because Booth is high as a kite from a cigarette dipped in acid. But he’s sober enough not only to take-down the killers, but to indulge in a lot of brutality too. It is here that the sadism visited upon the women far exceeds that visited on the male killer: the women’s face smashed all over the place, a dog set upon the other, then she’s set upon with a flame-thrower. Although why Rick Dalton would immediately reach for a flame-thrower has more to do with what an audience already knows from Dalton’s history more than what he is aware of, or what we know of his character. A fully working, antique ready-to-go flamethrower just kept within easy reach? And then he is just left to pal up with neighbours. But it should be noted that a friend of mine found Dalton’s closing introduction to Tate very moving.  Meanwhile, the police seem to just accept what we the audience already know and leave Booth and Dalton without further questioning.

It’s just a movie. What does it matter?

And when it starts ‘Once Upon a Time…’, it’s a fairy-tale and this excuses everything.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, because there’s some great stuff here, but I don’t know if I fully trusted it.

• *          Kim, Morgan, “To Live and Die in L.A.”, ‘Sight & Sound’ (September 2019, Vol. 29 Issue 9) pg. 24-5.

 With thanks to Joe Sangre, Keen, Robert Sunday and Stephen Skopje and Lewis Rose for discussions on this.

Too Old to Die Young

TOO OLD TO DIE YOUNG

Nicolas Winding Refn, 2019,
USA, tv series

Ed Brubaker is one of the writer-creators of ‘Too Late to Die Young’, the series created with and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, and in issue 5 June 2019 of ‘Criminal’ he writes in his editorial:

"It is unlike anything out there, by a wide margin, so expect weird and shocking and hypnotic and gorgeous, all at the same time. Do not expect anything resembling a traditional TV series."*

And it’s hard to argue with this. Even the FX’s series ‘Fargo’ didn’t go quite so far out into being an unapologetic ambient piece. In ‘Too Late to Die Young’, the jigsaw pieces take episodes to reveal themselves and then assemble. Like so much of TV of interest, this can be traced back to ‘Twin Peaks’ in its unwavering pursuit of mood, if not mystery. 

It starts as it means to go on, with a 360 degree pan around a parking lot for three minutes or so. Has television ever offered such a series of cinematic gorgeous long takes? This is part of the very substance of this series, languid panning shots or 360 degrees to take in the full context. Every shot is like a fashion shoot. Every doorway is like a picture frame. The use of colour and light is a natural progression from the aesthetic that Mario Bavi was using in earnest in 1964’s ‘Blood and black Lace’. See how the cool blue of the night outside offsets the orange of the bulbs hanging inside? Relish the hellish purple of the whipping barn and the deep blue of the nightclub.

 

It’s often like photographs by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, or of David LaChappelle brought to life. The cinematography by Darius Khondji and Diego Garcia is exemplary. It’s the opposite of the neo-realism or insights offered by, say, ‘The Wire’ or ‘Headhunters’, but doesn’t indulge in the magic-realism of ‘Fargo’ and its more about the visuals than even ‘Gomorrah’. Rather, it is entirely cinematic in its patience and gloss. It’s a natural extension of the kind of glamourous crime fiction aesthetic introduced by Michael Mann’s ‘Miami Vice’. Cliff Martinez’s score creeps up on you, suddenly declaring itself from its drones and shadows and when the effect of this and the visuals coalesce, it is frequently sublime. But there is a plot.

Ed Brubaker has long been a reliable and excellent writer of crime comics, and it’s his mean focus that seems to have shaved off Refn’s campier dramatics while Refn’s aloofness minimises Brubaker’s empathy. Here, we have a wealth of characters and not one is particularly likeable or redeemable. Miles Teller is Martin Jones, a corrupt cop with an under-age girlfriend, Janey (Nell Tiger Free) – she’s a prodigy, incidentally. He’s just rolling with the punches, going from corruption to corruption until he kind of stumbles upon the idea of morality and decides he wants to be a kind of ethical hitman. Teller proves a great straight man for all the offbeat tendancies, stoically spitting his way through the killings and characters. He is minimal in what he says, pausing before he says anything, but shouldn’t be underestimated: he knows just what to say to get in and out of situations; to insinuate himself with a couple of despicable pornographers or to make a man wielding a shotgun in his face just lower his guard for a crucial instant (“Your mother sent me.”).

Meanwhile, Jesus (Augusto Aguilera) is biding his time to becoming a gangster kingpin. He keeps quiet because he’s insinuating himself; he’s not one of those hotheads. Beneath this silence, though, it slowly emerges that he is hiding the most appalling ruthlessness and egotism. Set in motion by his mother’s death at the hands of the police (an assassination?) – and there’s lots of incestuous kinks at play here – he is ruthlessly setting his ducks in a row, aided by his wife (Cristina Rodlo), who has secrets of her own. Most of the eroticism is provided by them: the flesh of Aguilera and Rodlo is swooned over by the camera in equal measure with the male, the female and the gay gaze being equally used.  

Elsewhere, you can debate about who is more nutzo and enjoyable: William Baldwin’s performance as the growling father of Teller’s underage girlfriend or Hart Bochner as the police chief that treats his station as an amateur dramatics venue.

Even as it takes its time, there are plenty to twists and surprises coming and when the storylines do come together, it doesn’t waste time getting to the nub. There are many riveting sequences: gangsters druggily dancing outside their headquarters before a drive-by shooting; Jones insinuating himself with the pornographers; a car chase that grinds to a halt in the desert; The High Priestess going about her work at a motel or a bar; etc.

Deadpan and ethereal, this won’t be for everyone, but if works for you, it’s a frequently mesmerising trip sprinkled with the exclamation marks of ugly crime fiction.

 “Please. Tell me that motherfucker isn’t a real cop.”

·        * “The Secret Ingredient is Crime”, ‘Criminal’ issue 5, June 2019.

 

FrightFest 2019 - Final Notes

This is all to do with the Main Screen films.

It was FrightFest 2012 that seemed defined by a lot of rape, from the opening film ‘The Seasoning House’ onwards, earning it an apparent nickname “RapeFest”. I remember the time we got to Jennifer Lynch’s ‘Chained’ on the last day (it’s good), I was thinking “If I have to see another woman dragged screaming across the floor…”

But 2019 seemed to me to have come a long, long way, a corrective. All the time, there were female-centred films where the fact they were capable and resilient didn’t seem to come with overcompensation or that macho kick-ass one-liner attitude; there was no compromise to their vulnerability. In a run of films with exemplary performances, even those that didn’t require so much were given nuance and far more than they needed by the female leads: I’m thinking of Kaya Scodelario in ‘Crawl’, and Samara Eaving in ‘Ready or Not’, and Hayley Griffth in ‘Satanic Panic’. There was less exploitational nudity and, in fact, probably equal male nudity. I overheard a woman laughing that she had “seen enough penii this festival.” Was this truly what equality in the genre looked like? It was refreshing because it offered several tough-nut female protagonists without all that macho-posturing and one-liners. I mean, you’re always going to have that, but I didn’t find myself rolling my eyes due to it much this festival. Well, aside from ‘Nekrotronic’. I mean, you couldn’t take ‘Bullets for Justice’ seriously and even that was balanced with male nudity and a homoerotic fascination with one guy’s arse. There just seemed added texture with all this attention to women as people. Even a majority of the male roles seemed to come from a place of enlightenment: for example, I was even taken with Alex Essoe in ‘Drone’ denying a typical jock role it’s usual asshole spin.

FrightFest Favourites 2019:

• Come to Daddy
• Bliss
• Daniel Isn’t Real
• The Black String
• The Drone
• Why Don’t You Just Die!

Yep, those ones that were mostly ambiguous and using horror tropes to investigate damaged psychology are certainly my preference. And ‘The Drone’ because it was so much fun to watch with a genre-savvy audience. A drone flying around a house being all sinister proved hilarious. 'Come to Daddy' because it feinted this way and that and was highly entertaining when perhaps you thought you had it pegged. 'Why Don't You Just Die!' was my preference for all the "rollercoasters" on offer.

There were so many good performances that we were spoilt.

• Dora Madison (‘Bliss’)
• Frank Muniz (‘The Black String’)
• Sarah Bolger (‘A Good Woman is Hard to Find’)
• Elijah Wood (‘Come to Daddy’)
• Stephen McHattie (‘Come to Daddy’)
• Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman (‘Spiral’)
• Sasha Lane (‘Daniel Isn’t Real’)

But that wasn’t all. Caitlin Stasey & Thora Birch & Macon Blair in ‘Kindred Spirits’. Samara Weaving ‘Ready or Not’ just getting down to it without being a superwoman. Hayley Griffith totally selling her fuzzy-bunny pizza girl as Rebecca Romjin thoroughly delighted in her ‘Dynasty’-style witch in ‘Satanic Panic’. Richard Brake in ‘Feedback’. Alexsandr Kuznetsov and Vitaly Khaev in ‘Why Don’t You Just Die!’. Hell, the ensemble cast of ‘Ready or Not’ and ‘Tales from the Lodge’ were a joy to see working together. Much to choose from.

‘Crawl’ reminded me that jump-scares could be good. My friend delighted in the fact that the men behind him kept jumping and bashing the back of his chair.

‘Dark Encounter’ at least reminded me that strange lights coming into the house from outside are scary.

I really wasn’t expecting ‘Bliss’, ‘The Drone’ or ‘Satanic Panic’ to be as enjoyable as they were.

Best parody/pastiche: ‘The Drone’.

Best WTF: obscene possessed foetus in ‘Ghost Killers vs Bloody Mary’.

Best trippiness: ‘Bliss’ and ‘Daniel Isn’t Real’.

Best fight: opening tussle in ‘Why Don’t You Just Die!’

Best fight and kill: Elijah Wood finds his assailant on the toilet and has to desperately fight for his life in ‘Come to Daddy’.

Best horror debate: the complexities of sex with the possessed in 'Ghost Killers vs Bloody Mary'.

Most coveted location: The coastal home in ‘Come to Daddy’.

Best downer: ‘Spiral’

Best props: the painting in ‘Bliss’ and the crossbow in ‘Ready or Not’.

It was good this year. See you next time around.

FrightFest 2019 - Day 5

DAY 5

THE BLACK STRING

Brian Hanson, 2019, USA

At the Q&A afterwards, the filmmakers spoke of how sweet and humble Frankie Muniz was and how he really pursued this role. And surely Muniz gives the performance of his career as mild-mannered Jonathan, a hapless slacker just trying to get through the day. But to stave off loneliness, he meets a woman on the internet, seems to contract an STD and it’s all downhill from there. Hanson spoke of the inspiration as being what if the homeless guy on the street ranting to himself is telling the truth? Muniz’s sincerity, intelligence and wiry energy makes it all consistently on edge as this seemingly meek guy gets more potentially dangerous. Is Jonathan just paranoid and deluded, suffering from a mental breakdown, or is he really the target of a Satanic conspiracy? The ambiguity is wisely kept right to the very end to let the sadness and tragedy linger. Surely a small cult favourite in the making.

Satanic Panic

Chelsea Stardust, 2019, USA

With an opening that evokes ‘Halloween’ and ‘Suspiria’, ‘Satanic Panic’ proceeds to give a decent bright-and-breezy fun-ride into rich people’s Satanism. It’s the kind of thing promised by the covers of teen horror paperbacks, and indeed it’s written by Grady Hendrix, author of the wonderful ‘Paperbacks from Hell’. It’s also backed by the genre bible ‘Fangoria’ and agreeably female-centred. Sam (Hayley Griffith), the sweet but not stupid pizza girl, amusingly gate-crashes a coven’s motivational speech looking for tips and – as she’s a twenty-two year-old fuzzy-bunny virgin and eligible for sacrificing – from then it’s a rush for survival through rich people’s yards and houses. There’s an excellent regally camp performance by Rebbeca Romijn as head witch, some coven politicking, some rudeness, a decent helping of gore and one-liners (“A sweater that smells like racism.”). There’s also the theme of rejecting your parents and adults and asserting yourself.  As a piece of camp bubble-gum pop horror, it’s highly entertaining without any feeling it should be exceptional.

TALES FROM THE LODGE

Abigail Blackmore, 2019, UK

Old friends reunite to commemorate the death of their friend Jonesy at a remote lodge and launch into horror stories at intervals. These mini-tales are minor diversions, not strong enough to give an old ‘Amicus’ feel, although the corpse on the windshield and the open rib-cage of Mackenzie Crook are vivid, the sex-ghost raises an eyebrow and Vegas-‘Lost Boy’ mullet isn’t quite the comedy segment as expected. These tales, occasionally directed by the cast members, that brings the memorable imagery.

The main tale is held up by a strong and playful cast, convincing as a bunch of very different but fond friends from University with Martha Fraser as the unaccountably bitchy one and Johnny Vegas puncturing any threat of pretension. But we don’t really get to know why the storytelling is a thing for them, or why Jonesy was loved. Mostly the comedy and drama is decently balanced before it goes-for-broke for a highly convoluted twist that undoes much of the down-to-earth goodwill earned by the cast to that point.

RABID

Jen & Sylvia Soska, Canada, 2019

The Soska sisters are FrightFest favourites and certainly their bubbliness and friendliness was all over the festival weekend. They expressed enthusiastically their love of David Cronenberg and their take on his ‘Rabid’ displayed much of the same competence and weaknesses of their former FrightFest win, ‘American Mary’. I saw one comment that we didn’t really need “Cronenberg’s ‘Zoolander’”, which I don’t think is quite fair: there’s plenty of room for updating body-horror in a fashion industry context – just as Refn used it for covens in ‘The Neon Demon’ – but there’s a sense that the two themes of fashion and Rose’s (Laura Vandervoort) surgery don’t truly end up saying much about one another. 

Rose has a car accident that leaves her hideously deformed, crashing her dreams of becoming a fashion designer, but an experimental skin graft not only cures her face but also her fashion sense. Afterwards, she no longer wears her hair back, big glasses and clothing up to her neck, but is more prone to a more conventionally idea of beauty (hair down, no glasses, more cleavage, etc). Cronenberg’s original may have been scruffy and lo-fi but it was visceral and disturbing in its ideas: a zombie virus transmitted as an STD through an armpit penis-syringe. Despite the make-up, the Soska’s reimagining is a far safer affair by comparison by excising the STD element and relegating things to a confusing CGI armpit tendril, or making victims toxic males deserving of death. Although Mackenzie Gray camping it up as Gunter is a delight.  

More disconcerting for me is that ‘Rabid’ threatens my criteria for internal logic, those details that aren’t paid enough attention to or just make me question general plausibility. For example, Rose is forever taking off her dressing as if that’s easy with minimum of weeping from a huge gaping wound – surely it would never be taken off immediately that way – especially when this very point is brought up later by a nurse with another patient. And we never see it reapplied. Of course, this is done to get to the gross make-up, but there’s no sense of suspense or realistic timing with it. Or when she returns home and messily eats blended food through a straw: wouldn’t she already be used to that; wouldn’t that be a scene best relegated to the hospital? Or there’s just a corpse left in the alley and never mentioned again?  Or there’s the writing board that magically clears itself between her scrawlings; or how, in the finale, they walk into the room but don’t seem to see that behind them until it’s wanted by the script. It’s this kind of lacunae that is generally dismissed with “It’s just a movie” but it’s also a sign of a script’s strength or weakness. It’s hard to concentrate on a serious film when it’s playing fast-and-loose with detail and using genre as an excuse. All films have this but when it’s a recurring feature it scuppers investment in the material. (For instance, compare with ‘Why Don’t You Just Die!’ where detail is all or ‘Bullets for Justice’ where it doesn’t matter and isn’t needed.)

Many others liked ‘Rabid’ more than me and, despite my complaints here, I have the sense that the Soska sisters are onto something good but that they aren’t quite disciplined or scrappy enough. Their worthy themes surely demand more fine-tuning? If anything, comparison show that however clinical Cronenberg appeared to be, he was very punk and his ideas inherently scary. The Soskas offer a fine, smoother doodle but it’s not as threatening.

A GOOD WOMAN IS 

HARD TO FIND

Abner Pastoll, uK, 2019

If Mike Leigh did horror? Pastoll’s follow up to 2015’s highly recommended ‘Road Games’ goes from the sun-drenched to the dull atmosphere of Northern Irish estates. Sarah (Sarah Bolger) is a recently widowed mother trying to get by. It’s pretty clear that wherever she goes, she’s up against knee-jerk assumptions and that there’s no help or sympathy coming; even her mother criticises her life choices. So, when petty criminal Tito (Andrew Simpson) gatecrashes her place and makes her an accomplice in his drug-dealing by stashing them in her place, she has nowhere to turn. Also, he’s taken from the estates’ ruthless underworld bigwig so trouble just keeps mounting. Sarah is forced to become resourceful and ruthless, all the time giving reassuring asides to her young children.

Firstly, Bolger is exceptional, a force of nature, never once compromising her character’s strength or vulnerability; never once do we think of Sarah’s reactions as inauthentic. Simpson’s performance as Tito is also of note, as we can believe he is as disarming as he is frightening. Edward Hogg as Leo Miller, however, comes from the predictable stock of villains with a quirk (he’s a grammar Nazi, so he’s a class above), whose humourlessness is unintentionally amusing because the bad guys are stereotypes where the film elsewhere is effortlessly nuanced; they are far more suited to some Krays knock-off. It arguably makes him scary but surely not economically savvy when he seemingly tortures and kills people for what they don’t know. The third act falls into standard vigilante vengeance denouement, although there is still the sense that Sarah is being forced into this role, just as everyone wants to see her a certain way. She does the required thing of letting her hair down and becoming more conventionally attractive to kick ass; this is ostensibly to disguise her appearance, but she keeps this look afterwards too, just in case we have any doubt that she will no longer be messed with.

Such an ending is crowd-pleasing and set up nicely but also safe. A little more ambiguity would not have gone amiss, but always Bolger as Sarah elevates the material. As Father Gore says, “We’re meant to applaud that, somehow, she’s able to make it out of a desperately ugly male world intact.” And add class to that too because Ronan Blasey’s script is always aware of social status and the impossibility of getting out. But who would begrudge Sarah from making it after all?