Tormenting the Hen is a small, dialogue-based indie that I watched at my work computer at 9 a.m. It is possible that my screening choices affected how I feel about this one.
Monica follows her fiancée, Claire to a writer’s retreat where Claire is developing a play. While Claire works out her play with two actors, Monica encounters the groundskeeper, Mutty. Mutty lacks social skills and boundaries. This begins to send Monica into a state of paranoia. Her state is not helped by the lack of support she gets from Claire. Instead, this retreat brings their relationship issues to the surface.
Tormenting the Hen has a short runtime of 77 minutes. And that is not enough time to develop all the themes in this film. The main one is Monica’s declining mental state. This takes too long to get going so it feels rather zero to one hundred. Mutty’s character and behaviour seem to be an attempt to depict an ambiguous threat. Monica finds Mutty’s overtures of friendship as something dangerous. But he might also just be someone with autism or a similar disorder that means that while his understanding of boundaries suck, he is harmless.
It’s Claire’s subplot that really lets me down though. First of all, I continue to be tired about films about creatives and their processes. It pretty much always feels arrogant and like its made for an audience of its creator rather than the average person. Such is the case here. Claire is a black woman, and her male actors bring up questions of race and gender. The movie doesn’t solve these questions which, fair enough. But it does draw attention to the concept of writing about a perspective not your own. I don’t know if it’s mean to be self-reflexive given that the writer and director of this movie about lesbians is a man. I do know that I didn’t really enjoy it. This theme brought the realities of the making of this film to the front but didn’t do anything other than briefly comment on them.
Overall, Tormenting the Hen is one of those movies that feels like it’s worth more to its makers than its audience. The tortured creative subplot isn’t going to exactly be relatable or interesting for a wider audience. And this isn’t a film about a mental break that’s a thriller, it’s certainly not thrilling. Tormenting the Hen felt like the product of a writer’s retreat; calibrated and intentional but potentially out of touch with an audience beyond other creatives or even, other people at that retreat.
Overall rating: 4.7/10
Other WLW films in similar genres
Writers writing about writers writing
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