Screens

Warning: This essay contains serious spoilers for The Weekend Away, as well as Promising Young Woman.

Content warning: Discussions of gendered violence and sexual assault.

From the very start, Netflix’s latest thriller The Weekend Away — currently, one of the service’s most popular picks — couldn’t have made its cookie-cutter ambitions more clear. Despite its apparent attempts to sell itself as a girl-power pop-feminist flick, its regressive ethos and leading duo — a pair of best friends whose long-held tensions culminate in a blacked-out night that leaves one of them mysteriously dead — seem ripped straight from the pages of a puritanical cautionary tale.

The film’s protagonist, Beth, is a recent mother with a quiet home life. She has brown hair and doesn’t drink and wears no visible makeup, even when going out to a raucous party at a Croatian club. Her best friend, Kate, is rich, carefree and recently divorced — she has blonde hair and drinks a lot and wears tons of makeup, no matter where she’s going. Kate is also promiscuous, which is made clear immediately in no uncertain terms and which becomes her defining character trait until well after her untimely death. It’s as though Beth and Kate have been ripped, unquestioningly, from the script of a shitty ’80s slasher flicks: smart prudish brunette survives, stupid slutty blonde dies first. Studios are still building films off of cheap sexual violence storylines and the exhausting bimbo tropes they design to deserve them, no matter how hard the films themselves try to posture as progressive.

The film’s typecasting is so contrived it quickly becomes almost painful to watch. Reliance on cliche is nothing new, especially not for a top-10 popcorn flick, but the film’s sexist story crutches collide with Netflix’s aesthetic corporate progressivism to unsettling results. By propping up pop-feminist lip service on a backbone of deeply misogynistic tropes, The Weekend Away enters a sort of feminist uncanny valley — and proves that truly empowering filmmaking requires a lot more than cringey pull quotes and strong female characters. And this isn’t anything new. Using palatable feminist vibes to mask unoriginal (if not blatantly offensive) storytelling is a trend I’ve seen pop up with increasing frequency. If you’re looking for another example, look no further than 2021’s controversial revenge story Promising Young Woman. When are we going to start seeing mainstream films that don’t rely on a supercut of sexual violence and women’s suffering to drive home their muddled attempts at a point?

Spoiler alert: after an hour of adrenaline-pumping intrigue as Beth tries to track down her friend’s killer, the film’s twist ending is that Kate was a victim of gendered sexual violence at the hands of a police officer, which would be a little more unbelievably shocking and a little less palpably uncomfortable if it wasn’t something that actually happens all the time in real life. This is but the culmination to a 90-minute barrage of tense, almost unwatchable breaches of consent: Beth is forcibly intoxicated and then drugged at a club, spends a quarter of the movie trying to figure out if she’s been sexually assaulted or not, finds her landlord’s secret surveillance room where he records women naked (this plot is entirely unnecessary and adds basically nothing to the film except more shots of undressed and sexually active women). The film, despite being marketed as a fun chick thriller with a badass female lead, is like a scared-straight drug PSA if D.A.R.E was all about trying to prevent women from leaving their houses. This isn’t to say, of course, that movies can never portray real, difficult topics; it’s to say that those topics deserve to be handled with care instead of being clumsily shoehorned into a plot whenever a script needs drama and a woman needs punishing.

But just wait, because the cerebral labyrinth of The Weekend Away isn’t done with us yet. After this plotline is closed and the film appears to inch towards its end, a glimmer of hope appears — we’ve been fed a false ending, and the killer isn’t who we thought it was! Is this an attempt at subversion? I wonder if the film is smarter than I initially gave it credit for — if it’s perhaps trying to make some kind of statement about the world accepting an easy answer when it comes to the death of a problematic woman.

Unfortunately, I was wrong, and the shocker final twist was that Kate actually died because of a different act of gendered sexual violence from a different guy. We are shown another assault scene, and we watch her die an even more tragic and demeaning death than we originally thought.

With the constant proliferation of this trope-laden gendered violence on screen, you have to wonder what is drawing screenwriters to write these tired, overdone storylines in the first place. Scenes of sexual violence are too often little more than shorthand for suspense, intrigue, or authenticity, particularly when they never deviate from the formula first laid out decades ago. Oh, the blonde slut gets murdered for being a blonde slut? How original!

Of course, this kind of unnecessary gendered violence in place of good writing or skillful plot development is nothing new to the thriller genre — but the thing that I find so uniquely insulting about The Weekend Away is the way that the film tries to position itself as a purveyor of feminist truths. When Beth confronts the police officer who she believes killed Kate, he points a gun at her and justifies his pursuit by calling Kate a slut, to which Beth retorts (with impressive brevity and sass, contextually), “That’s what men call women who won’t sleep with them!” It’s almost comforting to know that Netflix screenwriters are ripping lines from the same Tumblr blogs I read when I was 15.

This is a classic case of what I call “Twitter writing”: the insufferable trend of burdening scripts with out-of-place social justice one-liners that are clearly inserted for no other reason than to provide a viral-bait screencap on social media, perhaps captioned “Yasss!” or “Did she stutter?”

This is the problem with contemporary faux-feminist screenwriting. As once-radical movements have become commodified into a marketable branding practice, directors are certain to ensure that their scripts pass the Bechdel test but rarely stop to consider whether feminism in media could be anything more than skin deep.

And The Weekend Away is not alone in this phenomenon: as previously mentioned, Promising Young Woman was another viral film that used feminist aesthetics to tell a deeply unfeminist story. Despite overt themes of justice, sexual violence prevention and girl-powered revenge, the film just couldn’t stop itself from telling the story of a woman who was punished again and again and again, becoming a slave to her own unhealed trauma before eventually dying a tragic and sexualized death. Once again, the film used graphic sexual violence for legitimacy points — as if simply portraying a horrific thing is as good as meaningfully analyzing or subverting it — while telling a genuinely incoherent story that appeared to criticize the criminal justice system before deciding to rely on it entirely for protagonist Cassie’s posthumous “revenge”.

This juxtaposition between misogynist ethos and feminist posturing is ironic at best and sinister at worst. The reality that no amount of pithy girl-power quotes can obscure is that these films rely on the same suffocating misogyny as all the film-bro standards they purport to be defying, just wrapped in a pastel-pink package. This is the trap set by the commodification machine: the absorption of feminist aesthetics into mainstream media may seem refreshing, but for as long as corporations view revolutionary movements as just another way to line their pockets instead of inspiration for unexpected, underrepresented stories, we’ll never get cinema that feels truly radical.

Like the horror films of the ’80s that made sure to kill the sluts first as some sort of cosmic punishment for the crime of sexual liberation, The Weekend Away ultimately tells the story of an “amoral” woman who gets what she supposedly deserves. It may not say this explicitly, but its internal logic is clear; its half-assed attempts at girl-power messaging do little to mask the fact that all the harm that comes to Kate comes to her as a result of her promiscuity as understood through a patriarchal lens. Were she not a so-called slut, her storyline (and her death) would all but cease to exist.

Unfortunately, devoid of originality or tact when dealing with its thriller tropes, The Weekend Away is doomed to be an unimaginative Gone Girl rip — without a fraction of the aforementioned’s subversion or self-awareness. The trend of hiding misogyny behind bland, inoffensively progressive posturing is exhausting. Let’s hope this is where it dies.