Feminist Fear Freak: When Animals Dream

I really feel like I hit the jackpot with this movie. It's a feminist dream, really (plus the cinematography is great). It's only major shortcoming is that (yet again) it focuses on a small rural white town, and thus includes no POC. But in the end it's still a beautiful film that I recommend entirely. Much like the famous Ginger Snaps (another favorite of mine that one of these days I need to review), this Danish film uses lycanthropy as an analogy to puberty. But it takes it so much further that Ginger Snaps dared to go.

Our antihero is Marie, a quiet young woman. Her life is divided up simply. She cares of her ailing mother, who has an unspecified disease that makes her helpless and silent. She quietly butts heads with her father. And she begins work deboning fish at a local factory where men outnumber women 10 to 1. She also has a rash on her chest, and in our opening scene she is being uncomfortably prodded by a male doctor who makes a second appointment for her without even asking.

That is her life in her sleepy little town. At least until she begins to have desires and to ask questions. She wants to know what disease her mother has, and what drugs they inject her with. Why is she placid, unmoving and unable to speak? Why won't the doctor tell her about her own rash, which is now growing hair? She meets a boy at work that she is attracted to, and suddenly lets out a coy side no one has ever seen before. She begins to have confidence.

And this scares the shit out of most of the men around her. That's the crux of this movie. Marie represents the greatest fears of the patriarchy. A fear of allowing a woman her agency. A fear that if you let the hair & blood of puberty, along with it's sexual desire & defiance, go un-punished, she will turn on you. The fear that a freed woman will fight back. That she will kill her assaulters & abusers alongside those who watched her abuse and did nothing. A fear that she will fight back and be too powerful for men to overcome.

The things for which she cannot be forgiven are showing her body as it bleeds, proudly displaying her hair (depicted gracefully down her back, along her neck and across her bosom), and disobeying her fathers orders to cover herself. For holding power and being strong. She is punished for these. There is an intense desire by both the father who loves her and the co-workers who fear her to pacify her by any means necessary. This includes women who are comfortable with their place in the patriarchal system and resent her for challenging it. And it does not seem to include her lover, the man who tells her she is beautiful as he gently runs his fingers down the hair on her back.

The thing I really love about this film is that, unlike it's predecessor Ginger Snaps, Marie isn't repulsed by her transformation. She's nervous that the men she desires won't accept it. She's afraid that people will harm her for it. But the process itself she seems to enjoy, in all it's beautiful terror. Her new power and changing body embolden her and turn her on. Her defiance is mostly quiet, calculated, and intentional. She revels in her new self.

It really is such a stunning allegory. A beautiful portrait of a woman coming into herself, and refusing to take crap from anyone who gets in her way. And I'm behind that all the way.

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Entertaining 5/5        Intelligent 5/5        Unsettling 4/5
Scary 2/5        Gory 2/5        Funny 0/5         Artistic 5/5

Representation of Minorities 0/5 Representation of Women 5/5
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