3 out of 5

Director: Lucky McKee

As a reviewer myself, I can say with my untrained typing fingers that The Woman is interesting, very interesting, but strays too long without a direct focus before settling down into a somewhat obvious direction. Jack Ketchum and Lucky McKee collaborated on an amazing film prior to this – Red – a non-horror movie that ended up being the most focused work (yet) of Lucky’s and the most grounded of the Ketchum movies I’ve seen. Here things stray. The story of The Woman can be sketched out pretty easily – a man finds a feral woman in the woods and decides to take her home to ‘civilize’ her. There is incredible patience with the first 3/4ths of the movie, with much discomfort surrounding the family that – led by controlling husband Chris Cleek (Sean Bridgers) – keeps the woman. That so much is going on underneath the surface is grossly apparent, but McKee keeps it tightly roped in in a creepy way, holding back all of the sex and violence and abuse you’d expect from this plot with controlled bursts. These elements dance around for the first 70 minutes or so, interestingly juxtaposed with a bold score that works most of the time but ends up being too ubiquitous to work as fully as, I imagine, desired. Now LOOK CLOSE to these words – The discomfort that our writers / directors toy with never fully finds its footing for some reason, and it ends up being because of that last act, where character motivations are more fully revealed. While it’s still interesting, and those tightly wound coils are finally released, the single-minded predictability of Bridger’s character tarnishes the sense of build and plants us back in I-get-it horror territory, which Ketchum’s similar The Offspring did as well. The pair do take a dark topic and spin it a lot less graphically (overall) than expected, with interesting themes and styles woven into the viewing, but the film overall is a letdown, being slightly better than average when the possibility for much more is hinted at.