Jethica

Scott Hardie: “It was ok.”

This was quite a disappointment. The trailer made me very interested to see this, because it promised a spooky, supernatural twist on a solid premise: Two women are trapped by an obsessed stalker who literally cannot leave them alone, and they have to figure out how to rid themselves of him permanently. In a year of feminist films like Barbie and Poor Things that blew giant holes in male entitlement, this seemed like it had a lot of potential to be a quieter but no less thought-provoking take on similar themes.

It is not. Jethica is only 70 minutes long, and the first 45 are spent getting the characters into place and establishing the women's predicament. Then about 10 minutes are spent on the women solving their dilemma, material should have lasted over an hour. Then the final 15 minutes are spent giving redemptive epilogues to the two male characters in the film! Due to one's mental illness and the other's cognitive impairment, neither is capable of changing his nature, and yet they are the characters who make choices that change them by the end of the film, making them the true protagonists, and that's after we witness one of them commit a horrifying act of violence. The women are reduced to plot devices in their own film, barely talking to one another about anything other than what's happening at the moment. Finally, there's a tacked-on post-credits scene that has nothing to do with the rest of the film (it even violates the supernatural rules previously established), and feels like the production got some extra cash at the last minute and so they drove out to a parking lot in Los Angeles to throw together some bonus footage.

I am flabbergasted that this movie so badly missed what it was set up to be about. Did the filmmakers really think that the men in this story were the ones worthy of audience sympathy or happy endings? The four primary cast members share screenwriting credit with the director in what I'm guessing is recognition of improvisation, and perhaps the male actors were such strong improvisers (Will Madden does give several impressive minutes-long, single-take monologues) that the weight of the film just naturally drifted towards their characters, but I'm skeptical of that, given the location scouting and other advance preparation that had to go into their epilogues. I would love to take a crack at rewriting this script into a version that fleshes out the women as people, has them engage in actual conversations, takes their concerns far more seriously than that of the man tormenting them, and lets them do the changing and growing at the heart of the story. There's a vastly better 2-hour version of this film just waiting to be adapted from this material.

That said, the movie has some commendable elements. There is some breathtakingly beautiful footage of a barren landscape. The director makes good use of long takes, such as in a shot of a person driving away from and ultimately returning to the same place without the camera revealing where they're going. I really liked the four lead performances and the music and the photography. I wanted to step into this world and inhabit it and spend more time there. The title is a weird choice, based on a character's lisp that turns out to be barely audible, and there are arguably better options on screen, but at least it's memorable. All of these good things about the film further convince me that it really could have been something special if it had stuck to a story worth telling.This review contains spoilers. Reveal it.

− December 31, 2023 • more by Scott • log in or create an account to reply