G finds Dale Dickey who brings the rage

Ann Hunter (Dale Dickey) loves her husband. She’s never been one to take care of him. That’s what drew him to her in the first place—leaving his wife to be with someone more at her speed in their ruthless, callous attitude. But age comes to everyone. And for him, it came fast. Unfortunately, they had already grown closer to her son in a place that Ann couldn’t bear beyond the ability it afforded her to be closer to her granddaughter Emma (Romane Denis). So she filled her time with cigarettes and alcohol, distanced herself from everyone but the girl, and inevitably found herself reprimanded by her doctor for neglecting the care her deteriorating body needed.

While this development would usually give Ann the chance to turn the tables or redouble her efforts to self-destruct, Karl R. Hearne The G The man grabs her and drags her to a place of vengeance via a corporate opportunist named Rivera (Bruce Ramsay). With the Hunters’ doctor in his employ, Rivera flags the couple as a potential target to file paperwork and become their legal guardian without them having a chance to apply for the order. He followed the paper trail of Ann’s name to a seemingly unexpected inheritance and assumed he could get it by taking over her finances. So he and his partner Ralph (Jonathan Koensgen) break into their house in the middle of the night and take them away.

But there’s a reason Ann has no friends and her husband’s family doesn’t like her: She’s a difficult woman with a horrible past that has made her cold toward anyone who won’t meet her on her terms. It shouldn’t be surprising that Rivera is forced to bite the bullet—the money isn’t where it’s supposed to be—and it’s no shock when his defiance quickly makes it clear that he won’t be able to learn where he is by torturing him. herInstead, he’ll have to take it out on those close to him. But as with money, Ann has some secrets: the moment when her enemies leave her with nothing but the prospect of revenge will become her only reason to live.

It’s a fantastic premise that gives Dickey the perfect showcase to remind audiences why she’s such a hot commodity in Hollywood. That it took filmmakers this long to cast her in the lead role (see A love song (also) is a travesty, but I’m glad it’s finally happening. Because she commands our attention with a stoic stare that could kill if she wanted it to. All we need to know about how far she’ll go here is the scream she lets out when Rivera and Ralph start abusing her husband. It’s not a scream of fear, but of rage. Her Ann knows who these men are and what they’re capable of, as well as the reality that she’s currently at a disadvantage. So she has to wait. She has to plan. And she has to try to keep Emma out of the line of fire.

This is where Hearne starts to bite off more than he can chew. Not that the Emma plot isn’t effective. Denis is very good, providing a necessary contrast between Ann’s goodness and evil, especially as she tries to be more like “The G” and less like herself. The fact that this effort inevitably leads her into the fire isn’t a bad thing either: it gives us an outside actor to act as a go-between while Ann is stuck in Rivera’s care facility. Add to that an acquaintance with Ann’s past in The Stranger (Christian Jadah) with a kindly old man in the house (Roc Lafortune’s Joseph), and the potential for drama, violence and betrayal is high. How it all plays out is, unfortunately, too often obvious.

The story’s progression has enough stakes and twists to keep us interested beyond the genre’s familiar motions. The paths taken, however, are so obviously fraught with violence against women that you could say a man was in charge. It’s not enough for Ann and Emma to overcome the world’s inherent misogyny; they also have to survive every worst-case scenario. And that’s not even counting a nightmare story from Ann’s childhood. I’m talking about the few months in which this film takes place. There’s Ann’s stepson who resents her for being a “homewrecker” and refuses to see her existence as anything else. There’s Emma’s sexually abusive ex-boss and her “respectable” new boyfriend Matt (Joe Scarpellino) who takes his clothes off two seconds after their first date.

It’s as if Hearne didn’t think we’d see that these women have the odds stacked against them simply because they’re women. It feels like he’s speaking to a male audience who can’t understand their own abusive, macho ways, so he has to do it as openly as possible, knowing that they have to suspend their disbelief for feminism to exist. The whole enterprise has almost the opposite reaction to what he intended. He ends up having to risk destroying these women in order to give them the motivation to do what they do – as if the injustice of a man kidnapping an old couple to steal their money under the auspices of “care” wasn’t enough. They also have to be beaten and tortured.

I don’t think the success of the whole thing is spoiled by this filter. It’s just another example of the nuance required to tell these kinds of female-led stories, which women have experience doing. We’re so used to these male-gaze versions that we’ve eventually become numb to them, anyway. The real head-scratches here involve hard-boiled eggs and an unironically dog-spanking. They’re meant to disgust and amuse us, respectively, but both are so out of step with the raw tone of authenticity that the whole thing prides itself on being anything but entertaining. Thankfully, Denis is up to the task of carrying both scenes in spite of themselves, matching Dickey’s complex performance to give us a three-dimensional character amid the barrage of clichéd abuse.

The G had its North American premiere at the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival.