Kickstart This: Putney

Last night, I watched one of the best movies of the year: Stewart Thorndike's Lyle, which has been largely billed as a lesbian Rosemary's Baby.  It's an accurate way to describe the film, but it's also reductive, because Lyle isn't just putting a fresh coat of queer paint on Polanski's classic.  It's a radical take on the horror genre, one that uses its homosexual perspective to inform the terror its characters feel.  This is feminist horror at its finest, and purest.

The brilliance of Lyle is that the characters' sexual orientation isn't merely incidental, though even that would be a relief in a genre film.  Most LGBT movies are stories of unrequited love, coming out, AIDS, and death.  There aren't many happy stories, and those that are still usually involve one of the above.  To find queer characters in genre films is unheard of; superhero movies, horror flicks, and science-fiction are bulwarks of uber masculinity and classically defined sexual roles.  They are very straight genres, historically speaking.

And now here comes Lyle, an entry in a genre where women are often skewered, naked, and tortured for viewers' enjoyment.  The horror genre's handling of women is tricky at best and deplorable at worst.  Yes, once in a while we get a truly kick-ass Final Girl (like in last year's You're Next), but more often, we aren't so lucky.  So it's pretty incredible to see such beautifully drawn, capable women in a horror film, and lesbians, to boot; Gabby Hoffmann and Ingrid Jungermann are stellar.  Lyle is incredibly articulate, taking on gender inequality and sexual anxiety with stunning nuance.  A man is worth two women, the film observes, and decries.  There's a sense of lesbian mothers being Others, shown through a parallel to an elderly neighbor who wants to bear a child, and is clearly judged for it.  There's also a sense of ownership of the children; only one half of the couple can actually bear the couple, so does that make one of the mothers more of a mother?

Like Rosemary's Baby, the film is an exercise in establishing atmosphere, and it does so with finesse. A sense of dread settles in early, and is never shaken.  Lyle cleverly borrows certain story beats and character types from Rosemary's Baby, but also changes enough to surprise horror aficionados.  Thorndike has crafted the best entry in the genre this year, a film that hearkens back to classic horror while also utterly being a reflection of our present moment.  It's an impressive debut film.

Which brings me to some exciting news, and the point of this post.  In order to gain support for her next female-driven horror film, Putney, Thorndike has made Lyle available to watch online for free.  In return, she asks viewers to donate to her Kickstarter for Putney.  Considering how impressive her debut is, Thorndike is clearly a filmmaker worth supporting.

The (also timely) synopsis for Putney, via the film's Kickstarter page:

Feeling inspired by a TED Talk about connectivity, four estranged women go on a weekend hiking trip to The Putney Residence, a closed hotel with a dark history, where they hope to rekindle their friendships. But the good times end quickly when the most annoying member of the group injures her leg and begins seeing strange things in the Putney. Divided on what to do with their hurt friend, tensions mount within the group, but they continue to re-watch the TED Talk to get past their fighting. But soon the TED Talk starts telling them to do bad things.

So, watch Lyle, be amazed, and support Putney.  We need more strong, unique voices in our genre films, and Thorndike has shown one of the strongest, most unique voices in horror in recent memory. I want to see more from her.