She Will (2021)

Aging actress Veronica Ghent travels with her nurse Desi to a remote wellness retreat in the Scottish Highlands to recover from a double mastectomy. The retreat stands upon the ground where thousands of women were persecuted as witches. As Veronica reflects upon her life – as a child star she was groomed and abused by a famous film director – she becomes aware of and begins to commune with powerful forces within the earth which enable her to exact revenge...

She Will is the striking feature debut from artist and filmmaker Charlotte Colbert, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kitty Percy, and it unfurls as a bewitching amalgamation of atmospheric folk horror and MeToo-era feminist revenge fantasy. With her roots in the visual arts, Colbert effortlessly conjures an eerie atmosphere enhanced by a rich, stylised aesthetic and piercing imagery, backed by a pulsing Clint Mansell score. The film evokes an unnerving timeline of societal misogyny, paralleling past and present, from the emerging scandals of the Hollywood film industry, to the Sixteenth and Seventeenth century witch trials which claimed the lives of countless women. From the moment they arrive at the retreat, Veronica, Desi and the other guests are informed the land beneath their feet is suffused with the ashes of thousands of women burned as witches. Indeed, the strange healing properties the retreat offers are due to the high volume of human ashes within the earth it stands upon. ‘Witch feathers’, soot from the charcoal, drift through the night air. The drinking water brims with ‘witch ashes’ from the sodden peatlands where it springs from. The earth holds the essence of these women, their very rage, sorrow and power is contained within it, and breathes out of it during the night, as they are drawn to Veronica’s pain. Silently and empathically, she communes with them in her dreams and through astral projection, as she walks in her sleep through the dark woods surrounding her cabin. When Desi exclaims how creepy the history of the place is, Veronica responds: ‘It’s not creepy, it’s tragic.’ 

The Scottish Highlands, as much a character in the story as any else, provide an otherworldly yet appropriate backdrop for a story of female persecution. Academics claim Scotland's execution rate of women accused of witchcraft was five times the European average. It is thought 4,000 Scots, most of them women, were accused of breaking the Witchcraft Act between 1563 and 1736. Confessions were obtained under brutal torture, with the condemned brutalised, strangled and burned at the stake. This setting is also an appropriate one for a story about empowerment and reckoning with the past. Scotland’s relationship with its past, with its addressing the deaths of these women accused of witchcraft, has shifted over the years. Former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon issued a formal apology at Holyrood in March 2022, stating those accused under the act "were not witches, they were people and they were overwhelmingly women. At a time when women were not even allowed to speak as witnesses in a courtroom, they were accused and killed because they were poor, different, vulnerable or in many cases just because they were women. It was injustice on a colossal scale, driven at least in part by misogyny in its most literal sense, hatred of women [...] I am choosing to acknowledge that egregious historic injustice and extend a formal posthumous apology to all of those accused, convicted, vilified or executed under the Witchcraft Act of 1563." 

The character-driven screenplay is bolstered by powerful performances, particularly from a mesmerising Alice Krige as Veronica Ghent, who exudes vulnerability, dignity and a desperate, unspoken rage, sometimes all within the same scene. Traumatic memories she had locked away flood to the fore as she learns the director (Malcolm McDowell) who had molested her as a child, plans to remake the film she starred in and wants to hold open auditions for the role that made her a star. When questioned in a televised interview, he defends himself by describing his relationship with a young Veronica as ‘special’, and defensively suggests ‘they were different times.’ The relationship between Veronica and her young nurse Desi (the excellent Kota Eberhardt) provides the film with a warm, beating heart, and the chemistry between the two is potent. Initially bristly and impatient with Desi, Veronica is eventually disarmed by the young woman’s kindness and grows to respect her. As they quietly converse and share tender moments, a sisterhood emerges from discovered commonalities - both are strong, independent and guarded in different ways - and Veronica begins to thaw. In one scene, as she applies lipstick in the mirror, Veronica confesses ‘every mask has a function’. As the story progresses, Veronica begins her unmasking and, in solidarity with the women burned as witches, advances towards a reckoning with her past and with her abuser. These persecuted women begin to work through each other, for each other.

As events drift hauntingly towards a fiery conclusion, Colbert maintains a measured pace, interlacing the narrative with fragmentary flashbacks and striking imagery suggesting Veronica’s psychic connection with the land’s history. As Veronica dreams and sleepwalks through the forest, her connectedness to this land is underpinned. Just as the earth remembers the trauma, travesties and tragedies wrought upon it, so too does the human body. As Veronica begins to channel this energy from the earth, sinister portents materialise, such as sudden murmurations of birds, but Colbert and Perry never demonise these forces, these women, witches or not. The forces channelled by Veronica don’t seek to drain her, possess her or exploit her, there’s benevolence – justice is sought and power shared. When Podrick, a local man who invites Desi for a drink, follows her through the woods and attempts to rape her, he is literally swallowed up by the earth. In an electrifying climax, which offers visual nods to another classic of witch cinema, Suspiria (Dario Argento was actually one of the producers of She Will), Veronica, literally and figuratively, traverses the fire, withstanding the flames, and enacts a purifying vanquishing of demons.

She Will is a haunting, powerful work, an incantational meditation on trauma, survival, and a will to ‘be able to love without ghosts in your bed.’