The Coming of Sin

An earlier version of The Coming of Sin was titled Violation of the Bitch. One if its posters showed a bloodied woman with the tagline “she asked for it!” So, it’s more or less pointless for me to review this movie. It’s just really sexist. The best thing I can say about it is that at least it told me right off the top that it was going to be sexist, I guess. So, I lowered my standards accordingly. I was then surprised and relived where the violence and violation depicted on that movie poster turned out not to be sexual, just murder.

The film begins with the solitary Lorna getting a visit from her friend. Her friend is travelling to England and basically dumps a young woman named Triana on Lorna to take care of. Triana and Lorna get on well and eventually start sleeping together. But Triana has troubled dreams of a naked man on a horse who frightens her she believes means her harm. Weirdly enough, this naked horse man shows up in reality. While Triana is frightened of him, Lorna is intrigued and invites him to spend time with them. Lorna and occasionally Triana begin sleeping with him and eventually Lorna decides that she’s straight all along throws Triana over for the naked dream horse man. Triana takes this poorly and shoots Lorna in the face and rides off with the man who first appeared in her sexual nightmares.

The Coming of Sin walks both sides of the line between rough sex and rape. Many of the sex scenes are the dream man being physically aggressive with Lorna and Triana and them initially not seeming to enjoy it. This does inevitably descend into the women enjoying it so I don’t know whether or not these count as rape scenes. But really, that’s not an important distinction to make. The film’s sexual politics and views of consent are really bad. Sex scenes in the film start rough and there’s absolutely no conversation to determine a presence or absence of consent. It’s bad!

The character work here is also poor. As if that matters given the above paragraph but I thought it was worth mentioning. There’s no consistent character motivation. Lorna and Triana just do stuff and alter their opinion based on scene. The inherent decision to hang out with a dude who keeps showing up in dreams and committing assault is obviously insane and the movie doesn’t even try to explain it. It also doesn’t bother with Triana having any sort of consistency with her feelings. One scene she’s terrified of the dream dude, the next she’s teaming up with him to tie Lorna to a bed without her consent. It’s all over the place. It’s almost like the movie doesn’t care about character work and continuity.

The one positive I will give the movie is that it is good looking. The camera work and cinematography are solid. The dream sequences make good use of a hazy filter and some surreal imagery. The content of the movie is obviously bad but the visual presentation of this is almost frustratingly adept.

The Coming of Sin has some of the worst sexual politics I’ve seen in a movie. It doesn’t like women but also isn’t even competent enough to explain why it doesn’t like women. It’s just a lot of scenes where you think it’s women being brutalized but then it turns out they like it. Obviously, this is a garbage movie. Yeah, it’s irritatingly well directed, but its overarching misogyny makes this one of the worst WLW films I’ve ever seen.

Overall rating: 1.7/10

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