She Will

She Will poster

Veronica Ghent came to fame in 1969 when at age thirteen when she was cast as the lead of director Eric Hathbourne’s Navajo Frontier, due to be remade even as he receives a knighthood for services to film and television. For Veronica, things have been very different, alone in her life and recovering from major surgery at a retreat in Scotland where she had believed she would be alone with Desi, the carer who is ironically the more patient of the two.

Instead finding the house occupied by an art therapy collective run by the eccentric Tirador, Veronica finds herself on display, expected to play the faded but glamorous movie star when she barely has the strength to put on her makeup, unable to construct the mask which has protected her even as it kept everyone at arms’ length, instead finding peace among the trees which have grown from the rich soil impregnated by the ashes of the women who were burnt as witches in the area.

She Will; Veronica Ghent (Alice Krige) considers an uncertain future.

An iconic actress whose defiant performances from Ghost Story and Sleepwalkers to Star Trek First Contact and The OA have been built upon power and the unhesitating certainty of their righteousness, Alice Krige is Veronica Ghent, wounded, weak, and vulnerable: she doesn’t want to be old, she doesn’t want to be sick, she doesn’t want to need help, and she certainly doesn’t want to be around fawning cranks who think they know something of her, but she will survive.

The directorial debut of Charlotte Colbert who co-wrote the script with Kitty Percy, She Will is permeated with decades of accumulated wrath at wrongdoing and disenfranchisement, the bathwater filtered through the peat and entering Veronica’s raw wounds, her womanhood diminished by her double mastectomy but reconnecting with the echo of her murdered sisters, sleepwalking through nightmares which awaken memories of her own mistreatment.

She Will; Veronica Ghent (Alice Krige) finds inspiration in the rich Scottish soil.

Unapologetically tracking mud into the cabin, it will take time for Veronica to reclaim her voice, but she will, as will Desi (Dark Phoenix‘s Kota Eberhardt) who has her own unexpressed traumas more recent than the “completely different era” in which Hathbourne (Silent Hill: Revelation’s Malcolm McDowell representing the supressing manipulations of the patriarchy and recognising no fault in his conduct) developed his “special bond” with his youthful starlet.

Interpretation of She Will as subjective as Veronica’s furious impromptu lakeside art experiment,
it is tied to the woodlands of the Scottish Highlands in the same way as Without Name was tied to the forests of Ireland and focused on images rather expressing itself unambiguously through words. The glowing “witch floaters” of the charcoal burner ascending to heaven and the earth beneath oozing, crawling and penetrating with black tendrils like the cancer evicted from Veronica’s body, to heal is always a challenge, but she will.

She Will is on limited release from Friday 22nd July

She Will; the past will burn.

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