CONTENT WARNING: If you’ve only seen the posters and trailers for this movie, you may be surprised to learn that it deals heavily with matters of sexual assault. As such, we’ll be going deep into discussions on that subject in this review. Please feel free to turn away if your mental and emotional health demands. I would also invite you to leave a thoughtful and constructive comment to keep the discussion going, if you feel so moved.
When I first saw the trailer for Black Christmas (2019), I could practically feel my eyes rolling clear to the back of my skull. It’s a slasher film set in a college with a cast full of co-eds. There’s nothing the least bit memorable about the villain, the Christmas theme is in horrible taste, the title is generic to the point of meaningless…
Wait, what’s that? It’s a slasher film directed and written entirely by women? Huh. You don’t see that everyday. And the film is getting critically panned for its overt feminist agenda? Okay, now I’m definitely interested. Let’s see what we’ve got.
Alongside debut co-writer April Wolfe, the film was directed and co-written by Sophia Takal. She’s primarily known as an actress, with a couple dozen roles to her credit on several recent indie films. She’s also directed a couple of movies that nobody’s heard of, most recently some psychological thriller called Always Shine. (I may have to check that one out sometime — I’m always happy to see Mackenzie Davis onscreen.)
Takal doesn’t look like much of a horror director on paper, so it’s a good thing the film was produced by Jason Blum or it would’ve had nothing. If you’ve seen any Blumhouse horror film in the past decade (and statistically speaking, you most likely have), this film has basically no surprises to offer. The scares, the kills, the atmosphere, the shots and cuts and music stings, they’re all lifted directly from the established Blumhouse playbook. If you’ve seen one horror film in the house style, you’ve seen a hundred more.
I’m sorry to say that the characters are all as paper-thin as you’d expect from most slasher flicks, but there are a few standouts. Easily the best of the bunch is Imogen Poots, and god damn is it good to see her back on the screen. She plays our protagonist, a plucky young sorority sister still coping with her sexual assault at the hands of a since-graduated frat president (Brian, played by Ryan McIntyre). We’ll come back to that. Right now, the important thing is that Poots serves as a dynamic leading lady, admirably standing next to Samara Weaving and Kaya Scoledario among the fantastic “Last Women Standing” we’ve already seen this year.
Cary Elwes is probably the only “name actor” in this whole cast. He’s basically the face of the patriarchy here, the accomplished professor who’s come under fire recently for his purportedly misogynist views and curriculum. To repeat, our lead misogynist of the movie is freaking Westley. That’s a frankly inspired choice and it pays great dividends.
Then we have Aleyse Shannon in the role of Kris, the resident SJW of the cast. She’s the character who absolutely will not shut up about social equality, harping on about feminism and empowerment to the point where even her friends can get sick of her shit. While the filmmakers are perfectly clear in showing that Kris has her heart in the right place and she’s certainly not wrong, she can still be a short-sighted asshole who cares more about her ethics than her friends, acting as an agitator with no regard to the consequences. It brings the film some welcome nuance, and a bit of dramatic tension with the question of which way she’ll go when the chips are down.
With these three exceptions, pretty much all of the characters are stock. I couldn’t pick any of them out of a lineup if I tried. They’re every bit as broad and flat as anything in your typical slasher horror, except that the scares and kills are unremarkable to anyone who’s seen any horror film in the past decade.
So let’s talk politics, shall we?
A while back, Blumhouse produced a film called Happy Death Day (the sequel to which came out earlier this year, as you may recall). It was another slasher horror film set on a college campus. At the time, I lamented the tone-deaf portrayal of college life, dependent on so many outdated stereotypes. There was nothing in this portrayal of fraternal or sorority life that I recognized in my own college experience, and I was under the distinct impression that various nationwide laws and rules were put in place to make these backwards and frankly quite hazardous frat stereotypes a thing of the past.
And then Brett Kavanaugh happened.
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford appeared before Congress and recounted her alleged sexual assault at Kavanaugh’s hands, back when the both of them were in college together. She plainly described the entire event in surgical detail, and (to the best of my knowledge), she’s still getting death threats for it. Shortly after, Kavanaugh blustered his way through another congressional hearing, crying and shouting about how he drank a lot in college, but that’s no reason why he shouldn’t still get a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. Then he got the job.
Cut to December of 2019, in which we have a college film dealing heavily with themes of sexual assault, in which nobody ever listens to the women who insist that they’re in danger or even if they’ve been attacked already. Oh, and one guy explicitly tells his girlfriend “I like beer.” Yeah, it’s pretty darn clear what this film was made in response to.
Yes, the movie is blunt as a bulldozer, but there shouldn’t really be a whole lot of ambiguity to the message of “sexual assault is bad”. Moreover, the slasher horror genre is all about victims overcoming trauma, surviving (or perhaps failing to survive) pursuit and assault from a more powerful assailant, screaming out for help only to be ignored, law enforcement is effectively useless… taking all of these established tropes and portraying them through the lens of sexual assault is really quite inspired. And of course, it’s not like subtlety was ever a huge factor in the slasher horror genre to begin with.
That said, it’s not like the characters are split right down the middle so that all the female characters are inherently good and all the male characters are invariably evil. It’s true that there are women who actively reject feminism and have their own reasons for doing so, and it was good of the filmmakers to address that explicitly. We’ve also got male characters who are feminist allies, male characters who start out good and then turn evil, male characters who aren’t actively malicious but merely interested in keeping their heads down and staying ignorant, and so on. It’s not much in the way of nuance, but it’s welcome all the same.
It’s a blessing that the film was written and directed entirely by women, because this film with this premise would have been insufferable under male filmmakers. At its heart and core, this is a movie about living under the perpetual threat of sexual assault, knowing that nobody will believe you or come save you if anything goes wrong. If that’s presented with even the faintest hint of male gaze, the whole thing completely and instantly falls apart. It has to be crafted from a female perspective and that’s a huge part of why it works so well here.
(Side note: I feel the need to specify that I’m talking about sexual assault against women in this context. Men can be sexual assault victims as well, and of course portraying that will have its own set of demands.)
But then we have the other side of the equation.
Without getting too deep into spoilers, making this a slasher film means that the straight white male hegemony is here portrayed as a literal monster. There’s also a supernatural reason given for how men are turned into primeval women-beating assholes. This was a huge mistake.
For comparison’s sake, consider Assassination Nation, written and directed by the male Sam Levinson. There was another bloody female-driven film all about the harmful effects of the fragile male ego and the toxic patriarchy. Yet the psychotic men in that film weren’t monsters, just overgrown children who internalized the notion that they were somehow entitled to all the guns and power and women they wanted, simply by virtue of being a straight white American male. And the film was perfectly clear in portraying these violent idiots for the cowardly bullies they are when push finally came to shove.
Portraying misogynists as four-color monsters is every bit as counter-productive as portraying stock villain racists. (Harriet being a solid recent example.) In both cases, it’s too easy to say “This message doesn’t apply to me because I’m not a murderous psychopath, so I couldn’t be a racist/womanizer/whatever.” It’s far too dangerously easy to justify anything — even rape! — simply by saying or thinking “At least I’m not killing anyone.” And when the cause of this attitude is portrayed as something supernatural, that’s effectively the same as saying that the cause is fictional. The film capably demonstrates that a life doesn’t have to be ended to be destroyed, but it actively botches the fundamentally human fallacies and flaws that allow a single person — hell, even an entire society! — to justify sexual assault.
It takes a woman to portray life after the trauma of sexual assault, ditto for the paranoia of living under the constant threat of sexual assault. But it takes a man to successfully portray the entitled patriarchal mindset that leads to sexual assault getting committed and justified, the feeling of existential peril at the threat of losing the power we’ve always taken for granted, and why those attitudes are full of shit. And anyway, the kind of men who most desperately need to hear that message are the kind of men who would never stand to hear it from a woman.
On a final miscellaneous note, I suppose I should talk about the Christmas setting. It really doesn’t add much. The long nights, colored lights, and rainy/snowy weather do a lot for the atmosphere, and it helps to have a decent reason for why pretty much the entire student body is off-campus. Otherwise, the film could’ve taken place at any time of year and not much would’ve changed.
Black Christmas (2019) is an incendiary work of feminist cinema disguised as a mediocre slasher horror. I sincerely want to applaud the filmmakers for going big, going bold, and going political in a genre too often decried as “brain dead”. The filmmakers admirably use the genre trappings to portray the emotions involved with sexual assault, which was truly an inspired choice. Even so, as much as I really want to love this movie, I can’t get past the dull scares, the flat characters, and the portrayal of misogyny as something supernatural as opposed to petty and mundane.
With a runtime of 90 minutes, at least it’s a quick and disposable horror flick if nothing else. Definitely one for a rental.