This should have been obvious a long time ago, but here we are: no more men writing or directing rape-revenge films. We don’t need your opinions. Write and direct something else. Go on, it’s easy. You just make a movie where anything but rape is the catalyst. There are literally unlimited possibilities here. Well, unlimited minus one, really.
I mean, for God’s sake, people, it should say enough that this is an actual freakin’ film subgenre. There’s enough of these films to make a subgenre. Jesus, this is not okay.
M.F.A. is indeed a rape-revenge movie, but it’s written and directed by women, and features women in all of the main roles (men are all basically peripheral characters). Written by Leah McKendrick, who also acted in the film, and directed by Natalia Leite, M.F.A. is a very tonally incongruous, almost comedic in parts, but it’s packed with pathos. And at t its core it has some important things to say. Noelle (played by a very intense Francesca Eastwood), goes on her killing spree because she believes that the legal system has failed her and other rape survivors.
And it’s hard to argue with that premise for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that women report sexual assault to the police in incredibly low numbers. The current estimate is that only 15 to 35% of sexual assaults in the U.S. are reported to the police. Women rightly don’t believe that the justice system is on their side.
There’s going to be some debate over whether the rape scene should have been included in the film, whether it went on for too long, whether it was gratuitous, and in what ways it might actually be playing into the rape-fantasy angle that these films, again largely directed by men, perpetuate by way of purporting to show the horror of the act. Maybe it’s a cop-out, but I’m going to recuse myself from that part of the debate and instead listen with interest to any debate about the scene’s merits by female film critics. There aren’t a lot of women who’ve written about the film yet, but here are a couple to check out. I definitely encourage you to read those opinions on that matter instead of my own. It’s not just not my place.
What I can say for certain is that I’m glad that M.F.A. exists as a counter-argument in a subgenre so totally dominated by men. The classic example, of course, is the 1978 version of I Spit on Your Grave (I haven’t seen the remakes, so I can’t comment on them), which is a vile piece of shit where the victim finally gets her revenge in the final few minutes of the film, but only after a shockingly long and gratuitous scene where she is assaulted by her captors for an obscene amount of time. McKendrick and Leite used the tropes of the subgenre in order to subvert them. The nearly all-female cast, McKendrick’s script, and Leite’s direction take the subgenre in what seems now the only reasonable direction: if rape-revenge films are to be made at all, they should be made by women, and informed by their experiences.
There’s a lot of underdeveloped characters, plot points that don’t make any sense (seriously, how does she avoid getting caught?), and Noelle goes from timid art student to bloodlusting killer without too much in between. But these are hallmarks of the neo-grindhouse and trash cinema aesthetic. It’s what makes indie genre films so wonderfully entertaining.
Which begs the question: Should we be entertained by this kind of material? This will play to a majority-male audience, and I’m not sure this is going to change anyone’s mind about the subgenre, but art is about expression, personal or otherwise, so it doesn’t matter if sleazy dudes start thinking about why they really like watching rape-revenge films after watching M.F.A. It seems to me that McKendrick and Leite made the movie they wanted to make in the way they wanted to make it while clearly communicating their ideas. I think it’s good that the movie raises a lot of questions simply by existing in the first place. And you can’t say that about a lot of films. So in that sense, M.F.A. is both a success and something that’s much too rare.
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