Anya Taylor-Joy’s masterclass in complex femininity
Over the past decade, there has been an unending discussion taking place in Hollywood about the Complex Female Character (second only to the Strong Female Character): who she is, how she behaves, why she is so important. Women, we are reminded, have been so poorly represented throughout the history of film that we need a corrective, one that will balance out decades of institutional misogyny and the male gaze.
It has been a persistent conversation, , Taylor-Joy comes full circle with the very first film of her career: Eggers’ unsettling and subversively emancipatory folk horror . Set in the early days of America’s colonisation, follows a Puritan family trying to eke out a pitiful existence in New England, whose bonds to their faith and each other are pushed to breaking point by a lurking evil in the nearby woods. As Thomasin, the family’s quiet and obedient daughter, Taylor-Joy is a powder-keg of ripening womanhood and suppressed original sin. Taylor-Joy makes Thomasin strikingly naturalistic in the midst of claustrophobically orchestrated horror, her quiet demeanour and relentless toil belying a primal and yearning interior life. Taylor-Joy’s tactile, embodied performance deftly balances the tension between outward duty and long-repressed wildness, incisively laying bare historic anxieties around witchcraft and female agency: of what might happen if women’s latent desires are ever let loose.
