“I Support Women’s Rights and Wrongs” Movie Recommendations

The phrase is a joke, but it’s also an accurate description of a viewing experience. You watch a woman make a series of decisions that get worse and worse, and you have a wonderful time.

Not rooting for her, exactly. Not against her either. Just watching, with no expectation that she’ll learn anything by the end.

Male characters have had this arrangement for about a century. Women in film usually get handed a redemption arc instead, or a tidy psychological explanation, or a final scene where somebody forgives them. The movies below skip all of that.

Sorted by flavour of wrong.

THE FOUNDING TEXTS

Start here if you want the canon.

THELMA AND LOUISE (1991)

The origin point. Two friends go on a weekend trip, one of them shoots a man, and instead of unraveling they become more themselves with every mile. The crime spree is played as liberation, which is why the film still causes arguments. Nobody in it is asking to be understood.

GONE GIRL (2014)

Amy Dunne is the patron saint of this entire list. Rosamund Pike plays a woman who frames her husband for her own murder and then explains her reasoning directly to the audience, and the monologue is so persuasive that people have been arguing about whether she has a point since 2014. She does have a point. She is also a menace. Both.

KILL BILL 1&2  (2003, 2004)

The Bride states outright that mercy isn’t something she has. The films take her at her word. She crosses moral lines constantly and the movie never once pauses to have another character tell her she’s gone too far. Watch them back to back.

HEATHERS (1988)

Teen murder comedy, and the direct ancestor of every mean-girl film that came after. Winona Ryder starts out complicit, escalates to accessory, and spends the back half trying to steer a thing she helped start. Still meaner than anything made since.

AMBITION IS A CHARACTER FLAW (APPARENTLY)

Films where a woman wants something badly and the wanting is treated as the crime.

ELECTION (1999)

Tracy Flick wants to be student body president. That’s it. That’s the whole ambition. The film’s genius is that her methods are genuinely underhanded and she is also, obviously, the most competent person in the building, and the adult narrating the story is far worse than she is. Reese Witherspoon has never been better.

LADY MACBETH (2016)

Florence Pugh at nineteen, sold into a marriage, deciding she is finished being property. What starts as a small rebellion becomes something with a body count. The film gets colder as she gets bolder, and it never blinks.

I CARE A LOT (2020)

Rosamund Pike again, this time running a legal guardianship scam that strips elderly people of their assets. There is no hidden goodness. There is no wounded backstory doing the moral heavy lifting. She’s just very good at a repulsive job, and the movie is having a great time.

HUSTLERS (2019)

Jennifer Lopez leading a crew of dancers who drug and rob Wall Street clients. Structured as a heist film but it’s really a friendship film, which makes the betrayals land harder than the crimes do.

BLACK SWAN (2010)

Perfectionism as a horror premise. Nina’s pursuit of the role costs her everything including her grip on what’s real, and the film refuses to separate her greatness from her unraveling. They’re the same thing.

FERAL, BODILY, GENRE

For when subtext is not required.

THE SUBSTANCE (2024)

Body horror about being told you have expired. Demi Moore gives the performance of her career playing a woman who accepts a monstrous bargain to stay relevant, and the film escalates past the point where you think it will stop. It does not stop.

JENNIFER’S BODY (2009)

Widely misread when it came out, correctly understood now. A demonically possessed teenage girl eats boys, and her best friend has to decide what she’s willing to do about it. The friendship is the actual subject.

RAW (2016) and TITANE (2021)

Julia Ducournau, in that order. Raw is a vegetarian veterinary student developing an appetite. Titane is considerably further out. Watch the first one, then decide.

REVENGE (2017)

The revenge genre rebuilt from the ground up by a woman director. Neon, desert, no mercy, and a protagonist who transforms from prey into something the film treats as genuinely frightening.

QUIETLY UNWELL

No crimes. Still wrong.

YOUNG ADULT (2011)

Charlize Theron returns to her hometown to win back her married high school boyfriend. She is delusional, mean, drinking too much, and she learns nothing at all. The film’s refusal to give her a redemption beat is the whole reason it works.

INGRID GOES WEST (2017)

Aubrey Plaza moves across the country to insert herself into the life of an influencer she’s never met. It’s a comedy about stalking and a horror film about loneliness, and it keeps switching between the two without warning.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (2011)

Tilda Swinton as a mother who is ambivalent about her child before anything terrible happens, not after. That ordering is the radical part. The film lets her not want this and doesn’t soften it into a struggle she secretly loves.

ANATOMY OF A FALL (2023)

Sandra Hüller on trial for her husband’s death, with the film pointedly declining to tell you whether she did it. What it puts on trial instead is her personality: her ambition, her affairs, her success relative to his. Two and a half hours and you will still be arguing afterward.

MAY DECEMBER (2023)

Two women being awful in entirely different registers, one performatively and one obliviously. Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore circling each other. Nobody in this film is behaving well.

PERIOD ACCURATE WRONGS

The costumes make it worse.

THE FAVOURITE (2018)

Court intrigue as blood sport. Two women compete for the queen’s favor using every tool available, and the film has no interest in deciding which one deserves to win. Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone, all operating at full power.

THE HANDMAIDEN (2016)

A con, a double-cross, and a love story underneath. Park Chan-wook builds a structure where every character is lying and the reveals keep reorganizing your sympathies. Gorgeous and genuinely nasty.

DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) or BOUND (1996)

The noir grandmothers this entire tradition descends from. Barbara Stanwyck invented half of what Amy Dunne is doing. Bound is the Wachowskis taking the same machinery and letting the women escape with the money.