Two fine performances from Nathan Stewart-Jarrett and George MacKay, an opening act that had us rigid in our seats, and a plot that asks Jules to make choices we did not believe. Worth your evening, if you can take the first twenty minutes.
Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping have taken a hate crime and built an erotic thriller on top of it, which is either a brave idea or a tasteless one depending on how it is done. Here it is done with care, and for about an hour Femme is as tense as anything we have sat through in a while. The tagline is “Seduction is revenge”, and the film means it. Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) is beaten in the street by Preston (George MacKay) and his mates for wearing a dress; months later he finds Preston in a sauna, unrecognised, and decides to get close. The performances are the reason to see it. The plot is the reason we stopped at a recommendation and did not go further.
The opening is the best sustained stretch. Jules is on stage under pink light and glitter, and Buki Ebiesuwa’s costumes make clear this is a serious performer, not a costume-party idea of drag. Then he walks to a corner shop, still in the wig, and James Rhodes shoots the pavement outside in the flat white of the shop’s strip light, with nowhere to hide. We were horrified, and what horrified us was not the blows but the wait before them: MacKay’s Preston circling, needling, playing to his friends for a full minute before anyone lays a hand on Jules. Rhodes holds it at a distance, as if we were across the road and had decided not to cross.
Then the film moves indoors, and mostly stays there. Christopher Melgram’s sauna is tiled corridors and red gloom, and the house Preston shares with the friends who drift through it (Aaron Heffernan and John Leader among them) is a mess of consoles, cans and closed curtains. Adam Janota Bzowski’s score is a low electronic pulse that comes up under the sex and the silences and rarely lets us settle. Selina Macarthur cuts the sex scenes on faces rather than bodies, so what we watch is Jules deciding, each time, whether to go on. That is the right choice, and it is what makes the middle of the film hard to look away from.
MacKay does something we did not expect. His Preston has a shaved head, a neck full of tattoos and a voice pushed down into a growl, and every one of those things is visibly a decision the character has made. When he is alone with Jules the voice lifts, the shoulders drop, and a frightened person shows through. Stewart-Jarrett has the harder job. Jules has to want revenge, want Preston, and hide both at once, and the actor does it mostly with stillness and a stare that goes on a beat too long. There is a scene of the two of them side by side on a sofa with a video game, saying almost nothing, that moved us more than any of the film’s shouting did.
The trouble is the plan. Jules has one, and we will not say what it is, but the film needs him to go back to a violent man again and again, and the reasons it offers grow thinner each time. Freeman and Ng are more interested in Preston’s inside than Jules’s, which is an odd emphasis for a film about the man he attacked, and John McCrea’s Toby, the flatmate who watches all this with increasing alarm, is given worry and little else to play. The second half takes turns we will not describe. Some of them require Preston’s friends to behave conveniently, and the last stretch trades the slow dread of the first hour for plotting we could see coming.
It does one thing the revenge thriller rarely manages: it keeps changing its mind about who it is for. Most films of this type know from the first reel who deserves what. This one gets muddier as it goes, and the muddiness is its best idea, even when the story around it is creaking. It runs 99 minutes and does not feel padded.
The 18 certificate is earned by the sex, which is frank, and by the violence, which is brief and worse for it. Watch it with someone you can argue with afterwards, because you will want to.
