She Will: a bewitching feminist horror

Centuries ago, accusations of practising the dark arts were an effective way to silence defiant women; more recently, the term “witch hunt” has been reappropriated as a go-to defensive term by sexual predators and their defenders. Charlotte Colbert’s promising feature debut She Will, co-written with Kitty Percy, deftly incorporates #MeToo concerns to question the extent to which conditions for women have improved since the days of witch-burning in the 18^th century.

Alice Krige, in a performance finely balanced between spiky cynicism and vulnerability, plays former movie star Veronica Ghent. Once a child actress, in an industry obsessed with feminine youth and beauty, Veronica is now recovering from a double mastectomy, and grappling with existential questions of identity and ageing. Pushing others away has become second nature to her, and she launches into her daily routine of make-up application as if donning a mask of preservation.

For Veronica, intimacy has threatening overtones. This has a clear origin: as a thirteen-year-old, she was taken advantage of by a much-older director, whose cult movie Navajo Frontier she starred in. Hallucinatory nightmares and painful flashbacks haunt her, conveyed in uncanny, rapid montages of vivid, surreal, disconnected images. The auteur, Hathbourne (Malcolm McDowell), who is now on the search for a young replacement for a remake, remains celebrated and the toast of talk shows; Veronica has faded into obscurity and solitude, dreading the public eye and its demands upon her. She seeks refuge in remote Scottish woodlands, at a healing retreat which taps the restorative properties of ash that has remained in the earth from witch-burnings centuries ago. But a misunderstanding during booking means the place is packed with fawning, rubbernecking guests, rather than offering the quiet respite she had banked on.

Accompanied by her level-headed, compassionate assistant Desi (Kota Eberhardt, impressively evincing both sensitivity and grit), who patiently navigates her employer’s frosty rebuffs and capricious requirements while slowly edging into her confidence, Veronica stays on the periphery of the retreat’s New Age-y activities: sketch classes, therapy, and ceremonies around a luminous pyramid centrepiece, led by the theatrical Tirador (Rupert Everett) and played for sly parody. The woodland surroundings soon effect a sense of vital transformation upon both women. Elegantly shot in cobalt, inky light, the tactile forest, with its oozing black, glittering mud, is alive with potent forces. Veronica, whose body is a scarred terrain she feels compelled to armour against the world, begins to feel that the place, with its strange familiarity, is giving her a second chance at life; the historic source of the mud’s therapeutic powers is particularly suited to Veronica’s expressed desire to “clean the bastards out” of her system, and reset from trauma that has been stored in her body from both childhood exploitation and recent physical disease.

She Will favours rich, ominous atmosphere – leavened with absurdist wit – over straight-up fright. It masterfully blends nods to giallo (from black gloves to female delirium, featuring baroquely stylish interiors and Clint Mansell’s nerve-jangling soundtrack) and Gothic tropes (there’s levitation, and a woman in a flowing white nightgown on the run), transforming their import from victimisation to empowerment. Visions of women in punishing scold’s bridles, blood running down their faces, appear to Veronica, but they do not provoke fear within her. “It’s not creepy, it’s tragic,” she says of the stories of the women whose burnings mark the history of the forest, realising in kinship with the purported witches that the real monsters were their persecutors. While Veronica deals with her own ghosts in what develops into a lively revenge plot, Desi also faces a reckoning with male predation, in the form of a local over-eager to make her acquaintance, whose suspicious motives emerge at a somewhat Lynchian, nearly empty pub disco night.

“I made her into something. It was a completely different era,” says Hathbourne of his earlier relationship, or “special bond” as he calls it, with Veronica, echoing the now-infamous line of protestation used by film-industry abusers when challenged on the gross liberties they would take in more permissive times. Hathbourne is completely lacking in remorse, even as he feels with a cowardly dread that his past misdeeds are catching up with him. Crimes remain the same, even as times change. But a formidable legacy of female resistance has also persisted through the ages, and will not rest, even when women face bodily erasure – making for a magnificent denouement.

► She Will is in UK cinemas from tomorrow.