Hollywood still isn’t ready for women to take risks

Nicole Ackermann, Tribune News Service

There’s a good chance you’ve never actually seen a film from a woman’s point of view. For decades, mainstream storytelling has been shaped by a largely masculine narrative logic: linear progression, cause and effect, escalating stakes, resolution. It is clean, structured and goal-oriented. The universal “hero’s journey.” Even when women are at the centre, the stories themselves are often told within that same architecture.

But that structure does not reflect all lived experience. If you look at a woman’s biology, it is not linear. It is cyclical. Throughout the month, hormonal shifts in estrogen and progesterone actively shape cognition, emotional processing, energy levels and perception. There are phases of clarity, outwardness and focus, and others of introspection, sensitivity, volatility and heightened intuition. These are not inconsistencies. They are part of a rhythm.

To live in a female body is to move through multiple, sometimes conflicting emotional states without a neat progression from one to the next.

And when that experience is translated into storytelling, it doesn’t sit comfortably inside a rigid narrative structure. It fragments. It loops. It contradicts itself. It rebels. It can be tender and feral within the same breath. That is the language director Maggie Gyllenhaal is working with in “The Bride!,” an experimental, gothic love story about a woman created for a man who decides to rewrite her own existence. But its reimagining of 1935’s “Bride of Frankenstein” has been met with confusion, dismissal, critical rejection and disappointing box office returns.

As I watched this film through my lens as a woman director, and then returned to the reviews, I felt something deeply unsettling rise up in me. It brought back a realisation I had early in my career helming commercials, that I was making decisions through a distinctly male gaze. Not because I chose to, but because it was, for the most part, all my system had ever known.

And it has taken a very conscious unlearning to rebel against that idea — to say, in the words of the Bride, “I would prefer not to” — and begin to trust a more intuitive way of seeing. One that doesn’t rely on inherited, academic structures, but instead comes from a deeper, more instinctive place. Feminine leadership draws strength “from interdependence, not dominance,” said Chloé Zhao, who won the directing Oscar for 2020’s “Nomadland,” recently to the Guardian. “It’s drawing strength from intuition, relationships, community and interdependence,” which, she added, doesn’t fit the Hollywood model.

“The Bride!,” for this reason, is by no means a conventional film. And that is not a flaw. It’s not designed for universal approval, and Gyllenhaal doesn’t simplify her work or reshape it to meet expectations. She leans into something raw, embodied and, at times, deliberately disorienting.

The film resists easy interpretation because Gyllenhaal isn’t interested in guiding the audience neatly from one point to another. She asks something more demanding: that you sit inside it. “Personally, I think the way that women make movies, because of the difference in our experience, is different,” Gyllenhaal told IndieWire at the premiere. “It’s in a different language.”

At the centre of “The Bride!,” Jessie Buckley — whose “ancient” and animal screams of a mother’s grief in Zhao’s “Hamnet” earned her an Oscar for lead actress — gives a performance that feels similarly uncontained. It is raw, instinctive and almost confrontational in its honesty. Opposite her, Christian Bale brings a surprising softness to Frankenstein. Their dynamic is strange, tender and deeply human despite their monstrous appearances. It feels, very clearly, like a film made from within a female interior world. Whether consciously or not, it speaks to an experience not everyone will recognise. That does not limit its value. It defines it. And that, I suspect, is where the friction lies.

There is a theme throughout “The Bride!” in which the women who speak their minds have their tongues cut out. It is a blunt, violent metaphor. Witnessing the response to the film, it is hard not to feel an uncomfortable resonance in the real world. Not because criticism is inherently silencing, but because there is a pattern in how work that falls outside dominant narrative frameworks is dismissed rather than deeply engaged with.

And this is where the stakes extend beyond one film. When a woman is given a substantial budget and delivers something formally bold and unapologetically rooted in female subjectivity, the response carries weight. If that work is met with indifference or rejection, it reinforces a familiar industry logic: that risk, when taken by women, is less likely to be rewarded. And those opportunities are already rare, as only about 8% of last year’s 100 highest grossing films were directed by women, according to USC Annenberg’s annual study of the industry.

I would argue that women directors with a distinctly feminine voice have not, for the most part, enjoyed significant box office success. There are exceptions, of course, in Zhao, Greta Gerwig and Nancy Meyers, but they are rare. Filmmakers like Lynne Ramsay, Andrea Arnold and Kelly Reichardt, despite extraordinary critical acclaim, have seen far less commercial success over the course of their careers. And, as a result, may not have been afforded the same opportunities as some of their male counterparts, many of whom are allowed to fail again and again at the box office, sometimes with escalating budgets.