Veronica is a renowned actress who was revealed to the eyes of the general public from an early age. After a double mastectomy she will seek to recharge her batteries by engaging in a collective retreat away from everything in Scotland, it is there that she will face herself and forge a very special bond with the land of witches burned centuries before who through their voices will help her take revenge on those who traumatized her. She Will It is a story of women, their traumas, how they are passed down generation after generation, but above all the story of revenge.
Female rage
Through its subject and its main themes, one cannot deny the social, almost sociological significance of a film like She Will. It is a rewriting of several concepts that are both horrific and feminine, even feminist. First of all, rape and revenge, these stories of raped women who take revenge on their executioner, with whom he shares several codes. But also female rage, literally this rage, this explosion of enclosed emotions that destroy everything in their path once the wounded female character opens her mouth; here it is the witches who all scream together as if to avenge entire generations of women bruised throughout Veronica's story. It is a film of women, who speaks for them, and in which the female audience can find themselves in a visceral way, through a kind of common intergenerational trauma.
Between classic and contemporary horror
She Will draws inspiration, in her writing as in her direction, from classic horror but also from modern horror. The film produced by Dario Argento is for example inspired by Suspiria, as the director Charlotte Colbert admits in the interview she devoted to us (see at the end of the article); in its aura both suffocating and liberating. We find the classic codes of horror films that we all know : the cabin deep in the woods, the witches burned at the stake… But linked to a more contemporary reinvention of things, for example the figure of the elderly person is here a main character in search of rebirth, and not a dreary, strange, terrifying figure.
A film that awakens the senses
From this mixture of inspirations is born a very sensory staging, which takes up the visceral aspect that is the strength of the film. With the help of a very lively montage, which poses an atmosphere sometimes very calm sometimes very anxious and frantic; but also of a sound work, the most striking aspect of this realization sensitive to the senses. The feeling of anxiety rises quickly, then escapes, before making an unexpected return like a trauma that one tries to stifle. An effective way to transcribe this feeling and share it with the viewer. An interesting rewriting of the woman in the horror film, coupled with a multi-layered social discourse; all this encompassed in a staging with a gripping atmosphere: this is the promise of She Will. We had the chance to interview the film's director Charlotte Colbert, who speaks passionately about her story, her actresses, intergenerational trauma and her horror inspirations. https://youtu.be/lEGIkMm0Y2k
