08/12/2022
She Said is a film that demands you actively listen to the words, conversations and testimonies of female survivors. It's also about the power of women confiding in each other instead of staying silent, which is the subject of another film that has been making waves this autumn, Sarah Polley's Women Talking. Based on the 2018 novel of the same name by Canadian writer Miriam Toews, and set in 2010, the film centres on a closed-off, fictional colony of the Protestant Mennonite sect, where a group of women must grapple with their faith and the reality that their menfolk have been drugging and ra**ng them for years. Rage, fury, frustration, sorrow, humour, solidarity and empathy lace the varying perspectives of characters played by Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara and Judith Ivey, who are tasked with debating and deciding what they must do to live in a community without fear. Polley, like Schrader, never shows us the violent assaults – purposely keeping the abusers in the periphery so there is never any doubt about the importance of women being at the centre of their own stories of survival.