Final Girl (2015): They Don't Seem to Like Women Much.

Warning: Spoilers.

Final Girl is an independent film made by a male photographer; it stars Abigail Breslin and Seneca Crane I mean Wes Bentley. The story explains little and takes place in a time that looks simultaneously modern and as though it’s set in the 50s – this isn’t a strength. The whole film attempts to be somewhat of an artistic statement, with the directors use of lights – spotlights on each actor, often highlighting their shadow – is more a distraction than an artistic flair. Mainly this film feels very much like it was made by a student in film school, and that isn’t really a compliment. However the worst place this lack of experience or skill is clear is the writing, and directing.

The plot of the film is that when Breslin’s character Veronica was recruited aged 5 by William, Bentley’s character, to be an assassin who avenges wrongs, we assume. We are given little information about this decision and it is the first of many that give the film a creepy and infuriating theme rather than an air of mystery that I assume was the intention. We learn her parents died, but they must have just died before the film starts as he asks her if she knows what happened. How did they die? What was her life like before this? What did her parents do that lead her to being immediately recruited after their deaths? It is a film where I would be much more interested in the backstory of its female lead but it instead decides that it’s not that interesting. So instead it establishes Bentley as a father figure of this young girl who assumedly raises her day in day out as a young child whilst also teaching her survival and fighting skills. This becomes disturbing later in the film.

So once we have been told to ignore all of this and simply pretend that taking away a young girl’s childhood, children can’t give consent, and to brush away the ethics of this we see her training with Bentley. Despite her 13 years of training previously she doesn’t actually seem to display much of any skill. She is 18 when the film begins to follow her and yet the brunt of her fighting skills do not appear to have been taught yet. He teaches her how to strangle him, whilst he strangles her too; this mutual abuse is ignored on any real emotional level until she is given a drug to confront her worst fear, a drug that she will later use on her enemies in this film.

But her main fear doesn’t seem to be simply that she is frightened of him, or that she isn’t strong enough to defend herself; but more that him turning on her will mean that he is rejecting her. Yes, him romantically rejecting her is her worst fear. It is unclear really as to why she has feelings for him as again it is not explained, though it is deemed important enough to be a consistent subplot in the film. There isn’t really that much chemistry between Breslin and Bentley, mainly so both of their characters are seen to be cold. The only scene between them of her confronting her feelings to him out loud is a scene where she gets out of the shower and, in a towel, cuddles him on the bed and he rejects her.

All we really know about his character is that he is so much older than her that he once had a wife and child who are now deceased. If we are to assume that this was all before he met her, as she doesn’t seem to know much about them, then he must be considerably older than her. Never mind that if she died whilst he was training her what that meant about how much his wife either didn’t know, or was fine with. Once again the deliberate plot holes in this film lead to a very disturbing and ‘not okay’ world. So the main love story in the film is a very inappropriate one due to the age gap, his father figure status, her dependency on him in every way, and what could potentially be Stockholm syndrome slipping in.

But as I said that is merely a subplot that happens over a few scenes as the real focus of the film is Veronica’s first solo mission, it’s a real misogynist lovefest. There are four, presumably well off considering they are never seen out of tuxes, white young men who regularly find young women, tell them that they are going to a dance so they get all dressed up and then they take them into out into the woods and chase and murder them. Again watching the film I had no idea how there was so little interest in what seemed to be pretty, young white women going missing; it is unclear how long it has been going on but between them they murdered at least twenty women. What’s more is I have no idea why Veronica needs to go on her own to stop these boys.

The film tries to frame it as revenge, as though these murdered girls’ only justice would be their murderer’s deaths, an attempt at an eye for an eye. But the film doesn’t care about the murdered women any more than it cares about any of its characters. They are treated as beautiful, destroyed objects who exist as mostly nameless and only to be shown at their worst possible time; we only see women in their last moments before death or as hallucinations in the film’s climax. Neither attempt to show the pain and horror they felt does it them any justice, they are merely a plot point though yes one of the main ones. So instead the film’s focus is on the four boys and who they are.

Each boy, they are not men, is each given a unique character. The film explores each of them in turn before they go to attempt to murder Breslin’s character. We see Shane, who is defined by the fact he has a girlfriend, Danny who is defined by his quirky, loud personality, Chris, the leader, and Nelson who is defined by the fact that he wants to sleep with his own mother. The film decides each murderer needs a backstory, that each one deserves to be a fully realised personality, and that a lot of screen time should be given to them as individuals and as a group. They reminded me of a group of boys on Gilmore Girls who Rory meets at the private college she goes to who are reckless, privileged to all heck, and there is even an overly posh and quirky one of them too.

When we first meet the boys as a group Veronica asks how one of them can have a girlfriend seems as he murders women she also says that they don’t seem to like women much; now rather than examine the blatant misogyny behind a group of boys deciding to chase, hunt and kill women for sport the film decides the fact that their women are unimportant – even though it is the only real reason that Veronica appears to be doing this on her own seems as she fits their profile. No instead Bentley just replies that they don’t seem to like anyone much. This appears to imply that they are simply psychopathic killers who merely chose women by chance.

Before the film’s climatic hunt we are given two scenes in a diner where she interacts individually with Shane’s girlfriend and the leader of the group Chris. The scene with the girlfriend is one that feels dreadfully like it was written by a man, which it was. It tries to be a bit witty – “I’m a vanilla girl” “You should give yourself more credit” - to have Veronica explore why this girl can be with a murderer and not know it but just ends up feeling awkward and simply blames this girl for not realising who she’s with and leaving him. Then we get the scene that starts the main plot, Veronica is dressed up and sat in the diner and when Chris – who’s penchant for blonde women has already been establish because we all know women’s personalities, bodies, wants, needs desires and all the rest are neatly defined by what hair colour we have – sees her.

The irritating use of light is used to quite literally highlight Veronica, as though a psychopathic murderer has just fallen in love when really he’s just found the perfect object to kill. But oh did he pick the wrong object, for this women is an actual woman with skills and hands to punch with. She won’t simply run and scream and get shot like her predecessor, the also blonde, Jennifer. He flirts, as it were, with her and she establishes herself as Not Like Other Girls™. So he asks her out to what he thinks she thinks is a dance but what we all know is his and his friends attempt to end her life. I assume we’re meant to watch, with juicy dramatic irony, as we sit there knowing that him and his friends will instead die at her hands. But with such bad everything it feels utterly hollow.

Veronica’s character is not necessarily unique either, in an age where most films are written by men we have this singular version of a strong woman where her skills in murder and violence are what makes her As Good As Men. But Veronica isn’t a feminist figurehead, she’s barely a character at all; Breslin is a great actress and she gives it her all but there’s just no saving her from bad writing and directing. Moreover however it follows a recent trend in films to subvert a horror trope, the film’s namesake, the Final Girl. Seems as horror films are a chance for men to depict graphic violence against women with a somewhat free pass it has also meant that there will be plenty of women who need to survive at least near the end of the film so the narrative has someone to follow. Often these characters are murdered but ultimately they became a cliché, and one that isn’t even specific to women as many horror films have Final Boys too, as it were.

It is this subversion that I feel is actually no real subversion at all. For example if we look at the film You’re Next, which I enjoyed but also has its problems, we see what is meant to be an extreme flipping of this trope on its head. The main female character not only survives but she fights back, and she does so hard. What was meant to be a simple murder your whole family for their life insurance scheme becomes those who schemed, including her own boyfriend, end up getting murdered by her. It’s bad enough that women in films are forced to be violent just to be heard and treated like a real character and not an object. As a feminist I don’t say anymore that feminism is about equality because for me it’s not; it’s about liberating women out from under men’s dirty shoe. Equality with men would mean having the equal power to rape, to destroy lives, to take lives and none of that is what I want for women. It is not strong or brave to take a life, misogynistic men do it every day and they are cowards.

But it gets worse as we find out that in You’re Next the only reason she knows how to fight back is because her father was a survivalist and raised her in a camp designed to teach people how to stay alive. So now we have two films who are both trying to show a woman who knows how to fight back and both only can because they have skills, that took years to master, taught to them by men. Not even women who learnt skills themselves because they grew up in a world that has men who want to kill them, not women who learnt skills because their mothers taught them to survive in a world that wants to kill them, and not even women who bloody well taught themselves how to survive because those are skills that can come in handy one day. It’s a joke, one often shrugs off women’s fighting skills by saying that she grew up with brothers. It’s utter nonsense.

The film’s climax is one that tries hard to be somewhat deep, to examine humans and their deepest darkest fears as we finally see the boys drink the mixture of truth serum and what amounts to a fear toxin during a sigh worthy scene of truth or dare. Each boys’ reaction to their fears is what allows Veronica to fight back and kill them, this in and of itself is also insulting. She struggles with each fight, it doesn’t really appear that she was taught how to use her smaller size to her advantage – get in close – or how to use the fact that she is not as strong as each boy to help rather than hinder her. Even in Divergent we are given a scene where the female lead Tris is taught to use her elbows to accommodate her small and weaker size. As we see in the final fight against Chris who hadn’t drank the mixture when it’s not in play she has a very, very difficult time holding her own.

The quirky boy’s fear is as weird as he is and is a fear of Pandas and it’s not that hard for Veronica to kill him. The boy with the girlfriend’s fear felt somewhat gratuitous as his fear is his girlfriend both cheating on him with Chris, we see them making out against a tree, and also her finding out about his murderous past time. It ended with Veronica strangling him but as a scene it ended up being severely dull. Then we are shown the boy who has an Oedipus complex, who is getting circled by masked thugs and we see him kissing his mother who earlier somewhat flirtingly gave him an ice cream before he left – as with everything else being disturbing in this film it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that his romantic relationship with his mother wasn’t simply a fear or hope. Each murder did not feel like justice it just felt like a boring end to boring characters in a boring film.

Finally, with the others dead and Veronica bloody, dirty and exhausted we see her try and fight Chris. She struggles and it isn’t until she luckily gets him in a stranglehold, with flashbacks to her strangling William, that she wins and can prepare what’s coming next. She feeds him the drink and whilst he is unconscious she hangs him from a tree, his feet on a tree stump and stands in front of him while he wakes up. We watch as she scolds him for being a big bad murderer and we find out that his greatest fear is the ‘Ghost Girls’, as they are credited, coming back to haunt him and avenge their deaths. This is the main moment, one of many however, that I realised that the man writing this had no real understanding of misogyny, or even psychopaths.

Yes this man murdered women with reckless abandon, yes he was probably a psychopath and they do have empathy but they can happily switch it off, but no his greatest fear would in no way have been the women he’d murdered coming back to get him. He does not care about women, he has no remorse for what he did else he would stop, he doesn’t care about killing them else he wouldn’t have started in the first place. No he hates women with every inch of himself, that’s why he treats them like objects whose death is amusing. So there is no way in hell that his fear, even in the moments before his death, would be the women he has killed. He certainly wouldn’t have felt so bad that he’d beg for it to stop, as though seeing them were any form of agony. Any shred of guilt he felt would be one warped by narcissism, one that is less about what he did to those women and more about how it landed him in a situation in which he will very probably die.

I would say it was a disappointing end but by then I had no expectations that could be dashed. It was the first of what I’m sure is many films from the writers and I don’t think that’s really a good thing. It would be better to actually try and direct the lights less and the people more, to research narrative and characters, and to do a lot more looking up misogyny. It was another film that wasn’t for women or even men as it didn’t seem to think much of either of them. I hope that any future attempt to subvert this genre will at least see women for the strong and interesting people they are and perhaps, I know it’s crazy but bear with me, give them their own voice in the film industry with which to prove it.