There are viewers who will undoubtedly leave the theater thinking that Obsession is a film about the terrifying and incomprehensible nature of female hysteria. My answer to them would be that this film does say something about that, but not in the way they think. However, before getting into the film analysis proper, I thought I would talk a little about the project of this blog. The reason I like to write film analyses isn’t merely because I love film. I do, but I’m not nearly that invested in passion projects (too…

I wish Wuthering Heights had ended immediately after the opening scene. The film opens to the wet and sloppy sounds of short breaths on a black screen. The sounds grow more and more demanding, and, at their crescendo, the screen displays a closeup of the covered face of a man being hanged. As the sequence continues, director Emerald Fennell’s camera pans to the enraptured faces of the attending crowd. Some snickering kids laugh at the hanging man’s erection distracting and angering a nun who is clearly aroused. The message is…

Normally, the term “hysteria” or “hysteric” is often associated with the female patients of Charcot’s times… women flailing their limbs, tearing at their clothes, screaming, crying or fainting incessantly. Pablo Larrain’s film Ema gives us a quintessentially hysteric portrait of a woman from a different perspective, one in which she is terrifyingly powerful.