- Also Known As:
- Unknown
- Year:
- 2012
- Countries:
- Predominant Genre:
- Crime
- Director:
- Outstanding Performances:
- Premiss:
- The rivalry between the manipulative boss of an advertising agency and her talented protégée escalates from stealing credit to public humiliation to murder.
- Themes:
- Alienation | Christianity | Courage | Destiny | Emotional repression | Justice | Loneliness | Materialism | Narcissism | Personal | Political | Sexual Repression | Solipsism | White culture
- Similar to:
- Review Format:
- DVD
Stabbing Each Other in the Back
White cynicism, fear & sense-of-entitlement writ large in one of this director’s more mature Hitchcock-style subjectivist thrillers - despite the somewhat-too-neat contrivances of the clever plot.
Here, the need for revenge is presented as a substitute for affection that such a need can never satisfy. As usual with Whites, the Personal is conflated with the Political with the result that neither kind of relationship is ever truly satisfied since here, quite literally, the central characters refuse to leave their personal problems outside the workplace. Lack of talent in Rachel McADAMS character does not prevent her from rising to the top by stealing the better business ideas of a subordinate; while claiming it is nothing Personal when it could not be anything else. Such confused and inappropriately-applied emotions lead one to the inevitable conclusion that such people have no really-satisfying home life; making this something of a critique of the professional successes and personal failures so common in Caucasian culture.
The Battling Bitches aspect of the drama is the most immediately appealing and compelling part of the drama - with the three female leads focusing our entire attention on their characters and their superb acting. Women are far more imaginative when it comes to the dish best served cold, and it would be hard to imagine such a satisfying drama if the antagonists were male.
In the end, the relationships that the emotionally-repressed engage in amount to no more than emotional blackmail; trying desperately to prize from the other person more than one already possesses in exchange for material success. All of the characters here are trapped in an internecine strife from which only the brave (or the foolhardy) can ever hope to escape, without first having something to escape to, without fear of losing their jobs, their friends or their families.
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