Golden age of the creepy woman in Tar, Eileen and May December
These films revel in their depictions of female characters with sinister vibes and dark secrets – and Hollywood’s leading actors are flocking to take the roles.
Two scary women doing sinister things that ruin lives. That could describe this year’s Exorcist reboot – which was indeed about two demonic females wreaking havoc on humanity – but it’s also a fit for May December, a domestic dramedy that opens in Australian cinemas in February. There’s violence in this film’s quiet family tableau, just not the kind that draws blood.
Feeling vaguely unsettled at the movies but not sure why? It may be the fault of disturbing leading ladies whose behaviour makes audiences squirm.
In May December, Julianne Moore’s Gracie serves time for having sex with a 13-year-old boy, then years later purports to be living happily ever after with that now-grown man as his wife and mother of their three children.
Elizabeth, an actor played by Natalie Portman, arrives at Gracie’s home to research her for a movie role. Elizabeth’s potential to exploit Gracie to further her own acting career is palpable. But Gracie’s stealth powers of control and her tight clutch on her love-story narrative are fearsome.
“The women that I’ve known in my life that have any similarities to Gracie are certainly not predators like she is,” screenwriter Samy Burch says.
“But there was a familiarity to me – certain ways in which she exists in the world and refuses to examine herself, the ways she manipulates other people whether she’s aware of it or not.”
Women fit to make your skin crawl have arrived on screen not only in horror movies, where they’re expected, but also in tidy dramas. They’re upping the ante on the Unlikeable Woman, an archetype that gathered steam in the past 10 years as female filmmakers and actors aimed for more realistic and darker portrayals of complex female characters. But the latest screen queens are more than unlikeable. They’re creepy.
Eileen, a chilling Hitchcock-style drama, stars Anne Hathaway as Rebecca, a newly arrived psychologist at a boys’ prison outside Boston in the 1960s. Lonely prison secretary Eileen is immediately seduced by this sophisticated stranger and the two appear to grow closer. But Rebecca has hidden motives and she ultimately leads an unwitting Eileen into a revenge plot that reveals the darkness in both characters.
A woman with sinister vibes appeared in last year’s Tar, with Cate Blanchett as a world-famous conductor hounded by accusations of sexual misconduct with her female underlings. Olivia Colman’s solo vacationer in the 2021 movie The Lost Daughter heroically locates a missing child but then shows her inner lawlessness when she steals the girl’s beloved doll and reveals her own troubling past as a mother. Blanchett and Colman both received Oscar nominations for their performances.
“These are all characters that level of actress would be potentially skewered for in previous decades,” says Anna Bogutskaya, author of the 2023 book Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate. “There’s a change in what we’re willing to accept from some of our biggest actresses – they’re clearly pushing for these roles, which are exciting to them as performers.”
Such uncomfortable roles are multiplying as indie-style films become awards-season darlings and streaming platforms allow for ever more niche audiences around arty fare. Amid the decline of the marquee movie star, some actors with industry clout are helping set a new screen agenda – one that often includes a morally compromised woman at its centre.
“We take our boundaries very seriously as human beings,” Moore says in an interview. “They’re so important to how we treat one another, how we engage with one another, what we consider to be morally correct.”
Portman, a producer on the film, was drawn to Elizabeth’s complexity. “I think that there’s something that we all talk about a lot … that we’re not here to be judges of characters and that we can never judge our characters,” Portman says at a panel on the film for industry publication Deadline. “We’re trying to get into people’s hearts and minds. And sometimes you play people who commit crimes. That doesn’t mean that you believe that those crimes should be committed. We as artists are curious … about the internal workings of the human heart.”
May December is loosely inspired by the 1990s tabloid story of Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher convicted of second-degree rape of her 12-year-old student Vili Fualaau, with whom she had two children. The couple married in 2005 and separated 12 years later. Letourneau died of cancer in 2020.
In the movie, Moore’s Gracie looks innocent and girlish, a tarnished woman in a Laura Ashley dress. She speaks with a childlike lisp. She bakes cakes and arranges flowers. She makes her husband, Joe (Charles Melton), into her knight in shining armour. When she wants him, she cries hysterically so he’ll tend to her.
“She had elevated him to being an adult while she remained this princess,” says Moore. “That’s where she comes from emotionally.” Moore immediately accepted the role after director Todd Haynes sent her the script and told her Portman was involved.
The film derives its energy from its viewers and their shifting readings of Gracie and Elizabeth. Are they despicable in equal measure?
Haynes shot the movie last year in 23 days on location in Savannah, Georgia. In one key scene towards the end of the movie, Gracie cracks a tiny window into her character. She preens over her unexamined life – “I’m secure,” she tells Elizabeth, looking her dead in the eye – and suggests that people like Elizabeth who allow room for uncertainty are the ones who are actually dangerous.
“In the duel between these two powerful female figures, you feel like it’s Gracie who is the most absolutely blocked and impenetrable,” says Haynes. “She wins out of denial of the truth. And that’s a very disturbing message.”
The Wall Street Journal