The Woman

Director: Lucky McKee
Starring: Pollyanna McIntosh, Sean Bridgers, Angela Bettis
Time Out rating:

Beware of horror movies that wield their gender lessons like sledgehammers – they're less for real audiences than for grad students. (I say this as a former grad student.) Dropping on top of the heap is Lucky McKee's barely competent domestic thriller, bound to make you groan more than think. It starts with a feral woman raised by wolves (Pollyanna McIntosh), grunting around her unspecified forest. Just as you're wondering if such types actually exist, she's captured by a browbeating suburban dad (Sean Bridgers), who chains her in the family cellar and plans to use the uncivilised female as a teachable object for his impressionable children.

If you're the pubescent son learning about sex in this equation, your luck is definitely on the downswing – misfortune also awaits a too-timid wife and a short-skirt-wearing educator, choosing the wrong day for a parent-teacher conference. The obvious material comes from a novel by cult author Jack Ketchum, who's far more interesting on the page; this is McKee's second dive into the writer's work after being removed from 2008's Red during shooting. Let's not speculate on the reasons for that; there was a moment, circa the director's impressively creepy 2002 debut, May, when he was thought of as an intelligent new voice in a ghettoised genre. That moment has passed.

The Woman opens at Theater N Shibuya on October 20