{Movie Review} Faye
In a recent interview with Vulture about how his film The Woman in the Window was softened by the studio to deleterious effect, director Joe Wright stated: “Unfortunately, audiences like women to be nice in their movies. They don’t want to see them get messy and ugly and dark and drunk and taking pills. It’s fine for men to be like that, but not for women.”
Faye, a new indie film from director Kd Amond and star Sarah Zanotti (who co-wrote the script together) is a direct challenge to this statement. The film follows Faye Ryan, a self-help author (played with confidence and vulnerability by Zanotti), as she spirals out of control while dealing with a tragic loss and trying to meet a book deadline. Throughout the film, we see Faye enact all of the behaviors that Wright lists: she gets messy and ugly and dark and drunk and takes pills. But it’s all in the service of painting an honest portrait of a woman who is suffering deeply and haunted by her past.
Faye and Trauma Responses
When the film begins, we find Faye talking to someone who isn’t actually there. We later learn that this is how she is coping with the loss of her husband who died in a car accident (an accident that Faye also feels responsible for causing). This isn’t her only coping mechanism; as mentioned, she also self-medicates with alcohol and pills. These are her means of keeping her trauma and anxiety at bay, just as her self-help books (with titles like Girl, Stop Whining and Girl, Toss Your Trash) provide her fans with mantras and techniques to help them feel that their own lives are under their control.
Control is an important theme of the film. We learn that Faye suffers from OCD, which she has had since she was a child. In one of the film’s cleverest techniques, the narrative is intercut with what appear to be scenes from one of Faye’s speaking engagements. In these scenes, Faye reveals many stories from her past, which shine a light on her present behaviors. This is how we learn about Faye’s struggles with multiple OCD themes (including religious OCD and harm OCD). After this revelation, we start to understand why Faye keeps compulsively adjusting furniture, pillows, and decorations in the cabin in which she is staying. As anyone with OCD knows all too well, compulsions such as these are an attempt to feel in control when everything feels a bit too big and uncontrollable. They help relieve the anxiety brought on by obsessions. They help the sufferer feel safe and protected from the dangers and traumas of the world.
Unfortunately, like talking to a dead lover, like taking alcohol and pills, and like looking for answers in a self-help book, compulsions are not ultimately satisfying or protective. The horrors of the world, and uncomfortable feelings like grief and guilt, still find a way in through the cracks.
Faye and The Babadook
And this is indeed what happens to Faye. Despite her attempts to isolate herself from the world and her problems in her editor’s cabin (where she is supposed to work on a book about healing), she can’t keep out her trauma, her anxiety, her grief, or her guilt over the death of her husband, just as she can’t keep out the sounds of a construction crew working on a nearby house. The film resorts to some typical horror tropes to demonstrate how Faye’s problems manifest physically: lights going out, doors locking on their own, ghostly figures appearing out of nowhere. But what they lack in freshness they gain in thematic heft. Faye’s fear when faced with these supernatural phenomena is what begins to break down her defenses. During her periods of panic, the film smartly intercuts quick glimpses of the accident that took the life of her husband and left her scarred. She can’t hide forever, the film suggests, and if she is to survive, she will need to abandon her compulsions and coping mechanisms and face honestly the demons from which she is running.
There have been other horror films in recent memory that deal with similar themes. The most apt comparison is to Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook. Indeed, both films are about a woman struggling to deal with the loss of her husband in a car accident. However, where The Babadook ends with a relatively tidy resolution in which the woman learns to recognize, accept, and care for her grief, which is presented as a monster external to her, Faye takes a more interesting approach, as the monster she is running from might just be herself.
Overall, Faye is a movie that seems simple on the surface but which gives the attentive viewer a lot to consider. It is tightly paced and edited, with sharp cinematography and a subtle, haunting score. All of these elements work together to create a slow-building sense of dread that permeates the film. Kd Amond and Sarah Zanotti are definitely filmmakers to keep an eye on. They are brave enough to challenge how audiences (according to Joe Wright) want to see women portrayed on film, so I hope that audiences are likewise willing to step up to see the raw and unflinching film that they have made.
