Director – Charlotte Colbert, Screenplay – Charlotte Colbert & Kitty Percy, Producers – Bob Last & Jessica Malik, Photography – Jamie D. Ramsay, Music – Clint Mansell, Visual Effects – Filmgate AB, Special Effects Supervisor – Neal Champion, Special Effects & Makeup Designer – Jacquetta Levon, Production Design – Laura Ellis Cricks. Production Company – Popcorn Group/Selkie Productions/Intermission Film/Filmgate Films.
Cast
Alice Krige (Veronica Ghent), Kota Eberhardt (Desi Hatoum), Malcolm McDowell (Eric Hathbourne), Rupert Everett (Tirador), Jack Greenlees (Owen), Olwen Fouere (Jean), Jonathan Aris (Podrick Lochran), Amy Manson (Lois)
Plot
The aging actress Veronica Ghent travels to a lodge in Scotland to recuperate following a mastectomy, accompanied by her nurse Desi Hatoum. Veronica only wants to be left alone and is upset when she arrives to find a New Age therapy group also renting the lodge. As night comes, Veronica is able to commune with nature around her, which begins the process of physically rejuvenating her. This allows her to reach out and seek justice against Eric Hathbourne, the now aging movie star who took advantage of her in her first role at a young age.
She Will was a directorial debut for British director Charlotte Colbert who had previously made a handful of short films, as well as provided story for Weightless (2017) and acted as an Executive Producer for Mary Harron’s Daliland (2022).
The film features well-known actors shown up at their least glamorous. I remember Alice Krige when she was a young fresh face in Ghost Story (1981). Here, when we first see her (at the age of 68 in real life), she is old, drawn and bitter about life (although that does change throughout the course of the show). Similarly, Malcolm McDowell, a great face of the 1970s, was 79 the year that She Will was released.
She Will comes out amid a surprising number of Folk Horror film coming out in the 2020s, many of which have tied this renewed interest to feminist themes. See also Matriarch (2022), Men (2022), Moloch (2022) and A Wounded Fawn (2022).
Alice Krige as aging actress Veronica Ghent
Beneath all its Folk Horror pretensions, She Will is no more than a Cancel Culture film – about how an aging star (McDowell) must be made to pay for his historic sexual misdeeds. What exactly Malcolm McDowell’s character did is not specified – it is implied that he took advantage of the young Veronica when she was a minor but we get no more detail than that. Charlotte Colbert pushes things even further than most Cancel Culture advocates are at least openly willing to admit and happily advocates the killing of the aging actor as just punishment for what he did.
She Will is a bunch of loopy ideas masquerading under the auspices of feminism, New Age nature worship, reclamation of female identity and folk horror. Not far beneath the surface, the film has a misandrist agenda. Aside from Rupert Everett’s New Age guide and some of his hangers-on, the only two other major male characters are abusers and rapists where both are designated as worthy only of death. The plot often feels like including whatever negative thing Charlotte Colbert wanted to say about men often when such has no real part in the plot like mention of the Scold’s Bridle to an entire subplot where the nurse Kota Eberhardt meets a man (Jack Greenlees) who tries to force himself on her in the woods before seemingly being swallowed up by the forest.
As I am always saying when it comes to reviewing these films, if you reverse the sexes and this were a film proclaiming that abusive wives and girlfriends were all deservous of death, then there would be howls of sexist outrage. It is only because She Will comes out under a banner of The Future is Women and redressing the balance of gender equality and inclusiveness that it can get away with stating such misandry.
