DARK ACADEMIA JUST GOT DARKER.
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY, 1979: A night at the library turns into a nightmare when a psychology student comes across a creepy painting, and the dark past of her long-dead mother threatens to impregnate the present...
Packaged in a plot full of sick twists, UNWELL WOMAN paints a visceral picture of how medical discourse has been used to repress women’s minds and oppress their bodies — and the painful lengths they have gone to fight back.
starring Lydia Makrides (DARK, Netflix) and Jack Medlin (CHANGING ENDS, ITV), Daniella DeVinter's gothic psycho-drama digs into a disturbing history of hurt, hysteria, and the wounds inflicted on women.
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
"This little monster of a film was born between the dreaming spires of Oxford and Cambridge, cities sprawling with gothic architecture and crawling with dark histories.
After bumping into Freud and Fassbinder while doing a German degree, I became obsessed with '70s cinema and the treatment of women’s suffering on and off-screen. UNWELL WOMAN both honours and heckles the films of that decade, channeling the freak-factor of films like SUSPIRIA and DON'T LOOK NOW, while also exorcising their cultish hold over me.
Totally independent and unfunded, this film was shot over five nights at my (spooky) college library in Cambridge. Though it's set in the past, the darkness it deals in belongs to the present. In the 1970s women were fighting for new forms of bodily, sexual, and psychic autonomy. Flash-forward to today: some battles may have been won but, as a woman with hidden disabilities, I know full well that spectres of the patriarchal past still haunt us.
UNWELL WOMAN is designed to disturb, to haunt, to make you mad and make you shudder. It dares to ask difficult questions — and dares the viewer to answer them.
"I hope it will creep under your skin, and make Freud turn in his grave.
UNWELL WOMAN - UNLEASHED 2024
