The Woman & Offspring
4K UHD
directed by Lucky McKee, Andrew van den Houten
starring Pollyanna McIntosh, Lauren Ashley Carter
Arrow Video
American horror films were very much in flux as the 21st century entered its ‘tweens. Torture porn was on its last legs and the rise of stylish indie horrors from studios like A24 and Neon were still a few years out. Movie theaters were clogged with dying franchises and attempted reboots of films from the ’70s and ’80s, including A Nightmare on Elm St., The Thing, and I Spit on Your Grave. It was not a great time for the genre, but still a few gems managed to claw their way out of the miasma, and one of them was the unlikely cult favorite The Woman (2011) directed by Lucky McKee and starring Pollyanna McIntosh.
The Woman is actually a sequel to the lesser regarded 2009 film Offspring, which was based on Jack Ketcham’s novel of the same name. Where Offspring is pretty standard low budget horror fare, The Woman builds on the ideas and characters to create a unique blend of horror and social commentary.
Offspring, directed by Andrew van den Houten, is basically a take on the legend of Sawney Bean, a 16th century Scot who along with his clan terrorized Scotland as they abducted travelers to fill their need for murder and cannibalism. In coastal Maine, cannibals have been roaming the coastline as far north as Nova Scotia for generations, their nomadic nature helping them avoid notice as they never stay in one place long. The clan’s fortunes turn when a grizzled cop is lured out of retirement to hunt them again after they massacre a family in Maine. He had encountered the clan years before and heads up a posse with vengeance on his mind. The clan are a frightful sight, naked and caked in mud, blood, and viscera. They have their own language, laws, and customs, and are utterly ruthless in their quest for tender baby meat. Eventually the law catches up to them in their cave and justice is served, but in the end the matriarch (Pollyanna McIntosh) and leader of the clan escapes into the forest.
Fast forward two years later, and director Lucky McKee turns the question of what makes someone civilized on its head with his sublime sequel The Woman. It is an odd sequel that doesn’t need the previous film, and viewers may actually benefit from not watching Offspring first. In The Woman, lawyer and family man Chris Cleek finds “the woman” bathing in a creek and for reasons known only to himself decides to capture her and lock the feral creature in his storm cellar. After he gets the end of his finger bitten off, he has to involve his family in his new hobby of tormenting the wild woman in an attempt to show her who is more civilized. She endures multiple tortures including rape, a gruesome attack with a pair of pliers, and being hosed down with a pressure washer. When one of Cleek’s teenaged daughter’s teachers decides to drop by for a surprise visit and wellness check, all of the Cleek family’s dark secrets bubble to the surface, and the concept of the family we are born into versus the family we choose is writ large.
The core of both films is the full body performance of Pollyanna McIntosh as the cannibal clan matriarch who evolves from a loathsome creature in the first film into a sympathetic anti-hero in the second. Especially in The Woman, McIntosh uses her entire body to portray a woman who, despite her fear and pain, is able to keep her wits and overcome her oppressor in a mesmerizing performance. Lucky McKee also should be commended for his restraint (which seems odd in a gory cannibal torture movie), but he allows the film to unfold slowly, exposing the depths of Chris Cleek’s depravity over the course of the film. This forces everyone to go on the journey together that ends with some horrifying revelations that further hammer away on the facade of the perfect American patriarch.
With striking 4K transfers, Arrow Video unleashes this grisly pair of cannibal shockers in a 2-disc set that is anything but bare-boned. If you love audio commentaries, this set has a half-dozen tracks covering both films. There is a feature length documentary on the making of The Woman, and the set features gorgeous cover art by Vanessa McKee. Obviously a must for fans of these films, The Woman & Offspring UHD set would make a terrific blind buy for fans of grisly low budget horror.
