Allure

Allure is a WLW movie starring Evan Rachel Wood. If you’re anything like me, that previous sentence might be enough for you to be very excited about Allure and rush to see it. Do not. This movie is very bad and will not bring you joy.

Evan Rachel Wood plays Laura, a deeply unpleasant and mentally ill woman with a history of stalking. While working as a cleaner, she meets Eva, an intelligent but sheltered teenager. The two bond. Eva becomes unhappy with her home life and mother’s new boyfriend and runs away to Laura’s. While this briefly seems fine and Eva is happy, Laura becomes increasingly possessive and Eva becomes more captive than guest. Laura does things like lock Eva in the basement when she goes out and acts furious and irrational when Eva pays attention to other people. The relationship ends up being the standard cycle of abuse. Laura becomes increasingly displeased and angry at Laura, does something distinctly bad and then reverts to being sweet and apologetic.

Within the first ten minutes, I didn’t get a good feeling about this movie. I had a correct feeling that the filmmakers were gonna make it creepy and “gritty” because that’s what they determine will make this movie good. I also knew fairly immediately, without having looked at the credits, that this was a movie written and directed by men. There’s just a lack of understanding of women even though the two lead characters are women. Beyond that, I just got the feeling that the writer/directors don’t respect or even like women that much.

Allure was definitely hard to watch but not quite in the way it was intended. Yes, watching an abusive relationship is always hard. But there’s an additional level of it being an abusive relationship written by dumb, male assholes who hardly even have a theoretical knowledge of such things. Their portrayal of females characters, queer characters, mental illness and abusive relationships are beyond poor.

Evan Rachel Wood’s character Laura is seriously one of the most unpleasant and unlikable WLW characters I have ever seen. This is both intentional; she is playing a woman who abuses a teenager and lies about being raped but also unintentional because this character is horribly written. Far from being some sort of in-depth portrait of mental illness, Laura comes across as a one-dimensional villain more than anything. The unpleasant, “crazy” stuff she does follows neither rhyme nor reason. It’s not tied to a well-written, specific mental diagnosis, it’s just whatever the writers think would be edgy. The portrayal of this character is so poor that it borders on homophobia. And I’m not qualified to speak for this community, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say this is seriously negative representation of a mentally ill character as well.

The best part about this movie by far is Julia Sarah Stone’s portrayal of Eva, the teenager who Laura becomes obsessed with. Like Laura (and everything else in this movie), Eva is a terribly written character. She comes across as being unfathomably stupid sometimes, missing huge warning signs about Laura’s behaviour. Any lick of common sense on her part and all of this really could have been avoided. There’s nothing in this character’s backstory that would suggest that she’d be primed to accept the extreme, abusive behaviour she experiences with Laura so it does come across as her just staying with Laura because if she doesn’t, they don’t have a movie.

Despite the terrible writing though, Julia Sarah Stone really shines. She absolutely commits to this character and displays an incredible degree of maturity while simultaneously being an actress who genuinely looks like a teenager. It’s a truly impressive performance. If anything good can be said about Allure it’s that I hope it’s a launching point for Julia Sarah Stone’s career. She did absolutely fantastic despite having a terrible character and script to work with.

Allure is a relentlessly unpleasant movie to sit through. The writer/director team who did this should be banned from ever again doing movies about abuse, mental illness, women, relationships or people. As an Evan Rachel Wood fan and a lesbian, I deserve better than this. If you yourself are an Evan Rachel Wood fan and/or a queer woman, you deserve not to see this. The only people who deserve to have Allure inflicted on them are writer/directors Carlos and Jason Sanchez. They personally deserve to watch Allure on a non-stop, torturous loop as punishment for inflicting this movie upon the world.

Overall rating: 4.1/10

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