Female rage was all over the movies this year – it makes sense

In Amy Adams‘ new movie Nightbitch, a woman’s outbursts of rage and raw honesty belong only in her daydream fantasies.

She delivers passionate speeches that then turn out to be only an unfulfilled desire of saying out loud what is festering in her mind, body and soul. At first, at least.

It’s anger, pure and undiluted, as she finds herself prey to society’s impossible standards of what a good mother should be and how a good woman should behave.

Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s bestselling book goes beyond the experience of motherhood to portray something more universal — the need of women to express rage in the ugliest, messiest way possible. To fight back, to complain, to unburden themselves of the expectations of niceness, likeability and beauty.

While promoting Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Anya Taylor-Joy defended a more nuanced portrayal of women’s anger. It doesn’t mean “promoting violence,” the actor clarified, but, “promoting women being seen as people” with “reactions that are not always dainty.”

This year, angry women are raging louder than ever in cinema. They have always been there, of course, but something is shifting in their portrayal in fiction movies, from Blink Twice to Immaculate.

Movies are (voluntarily or not) echoing the distress of women today: at the prevalence of violence against women, the policing of women’s bodies and choices, and the attempts by some to return to an idealised form of domesticity.

It’s not pretty, and it shouldn’t be.

Anger’s double standard

Anger is hardly a new feeling for women. In fact, according to a BBC analysis from from the Gallup World Poll, women are angrier (and more stressed) than they have ever been, particularly compared to men.

However, it does feel like filmmakers are getting better at portraying it on screen.

“Through the history of cinema, mostly western cinema, the images of angry women were always something that was vilified,” explains Anna Bogutskaya, author of Unlikeable Female Characters and Feeding the Monster.

“It was something that was really monstrous, something that was off-putting socially and emotionally, and so female rage had always found its way into film through other avenues that were not just directly women being angry on screen in the traditional forms that we associated with anger, like yelling or screaming or just having that anger, even in the performance.”

For Bogutskaya, there has been a clear double standard between male and female rage on screen.

“For male performances in particular, it’s always been something that was depicted as worthy, whereas with women, it was something that was depicted as unhinged and undesirable and something that only women who somehow were wrong in some way — those were the only ones that were capable of experiencing rage, as opposed to it being a very complex emotion, but a very human emotion that all of us feel in different ways throughout our lives.”

It’s not difficult to picture Glenn Close’s Alex in 1987’s Oscar-nominated movie Fatal Attraction as an epitome of this “unhinged” portrayal of female anger. A woman scorned, rejected by her married lover, goes on a violent rampage to ruin the man’s life, forever consolidating the sexist term ‘bunny boiler’.

In this and many other cases like Rebecca De Mornay’s character in 1992’s The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, a woman’s anger is directly linked to insanity. They are mad and ‘hysterical’. Their rage is unladylike and unwarranted. They are painted as violent villains.

A modern perspective would see how they are victims of betrayal and gaslighting, and how these movies reek of men’s fear of women getting a little bit too angry.

While anger was perceived as a respectable emotion for a male character, for a female character it was seen as uncouth and pathetic, and therefore deserving of a punishingly tragic end.

As Bogutskaya points out, male rage is traditionally seen as “productive” and “associated with worthiness and justice”. They star in prestige dramas, embodying lawyers who fight against a corrupt system or skilled vigilantes who protect all. Women, however, seem to need a personal reason to justify their anger, and it’s usually tied to gender stereotypes.

“It’s a great injustice that is specific to her. It’s a betrayal. Some specific act that you cannot extrapolate and say, ‘Oh, this is something that affects all women, this is something that all women should be angry about’. It’s just this one case. A bad husband, a bad boyfriend, a bad relationship,” the author explains, adding as well the protection, or loss, of a child as a common situation.

She adds: “You have to find a reason to justify a woman’s anger, because it would be too uncomfortable for us to realise that there’s a lot of things that are so deeply and constitutionally unfair and wrong about the way that women around the world are still continue to be treated, that maybe it’s too much to handle.”

While some movies paved the way for a different and more collective-feeling portrayal of female rage, from Marleen Gorris’ 1982 now-considered feminist classic A Question of Silence to Ridley Scott’s 1991 iconic Thelma & Louise, they were always met with social controversy.

We would like to think that that has completely changed, but the reception of films like Promising Young Woman in 2020 prove that angry women, even in a post-#MeToo reality, still have the power to make people uncomfortable.

From rape-revenge to the so-called #MeToo thriller

Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut Blink Twice, released last August, follows a young woman (Naomi Ackie) invited to join a tech billionaire on his private island. The secrets unveiled in the plot echo notorious sex-trafficking cases led by powerful men like Jeffrey Epstein and most recently Sean Combs, as Kravitz offers an explosive revenge for the victims involved.

The movie channels a kind of collective rage at sexual assault that was finally globally articulated in the #MeToo movement. Thousands of women took to social media in 2017 to share their experiences and denounce their abusers, opening a time for social reckoning in Hollywood and beyond.

It might not have changed everything (let’s not forget the returning President of the United States was found liable for abuse and defined as a rapist by the judge), but its ripple effects are still felt through cinema and TV.

Some critics have branded recent movies like Blink Twice, which address rape culture, as “#MeToo thrillers”. Is this a legitimate subgenre, or just an opportunistic tag for the sake of a catchy headline?

“I haven’t found that notion helpful, but I do think they are right to point to a trend of filmmaking in the wake of the #MeToo movement,” argues Margrethe Bruun Vaage, associate professor of film studies and author of The Female Avenger, Women’s Anger and Rape-Revenge Film and Television.

“The #MeToo movement was a fairly unique cultural moment of lots of women articulating and expressing their anger, and it’s very typical for fiction film to help us digest that cultural moment,” she adds.

Movies like Kitty Green’s The Assistant, Maria Schrader’s She Said and Jay Roach’s Bombshell have addressed the movement in the most literal, reality-based sense. Social thrillers, however, seem to be turning into their own category, and they’re becoming a trend since 2020.

These movies create their own kind of twisted fantasies to address real-life issues, from careerwomen trapped in a ‘tradwife’ nightmare in Don’t Worry Darling to the collective need for revenge in Promising Young Woman.

Along with its anger against powerful men exploiting women, Blink Twice also offers a powerful and contemporary depiction of the insincere apology.

“There’s a fabulous scene,” explains Margrethe Bruun Vaage, “where the focus is on this male main character and how he keeps repeating the words, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’. And I feel so much anger from the filmmaker towards these insincere apologies — there’s this fear that we don’t really believe some of these men apologising in the public sphere.”

The #MeToo thriller can be seen as a bastard daughter of the rape-revenge, a murky genre with a fascinatingly evolving perspective.

“The origin of the genre is typically seen as as an exploitation film, as the portrayal of rape and revenge was used for all the wrong reasons, it was just to exploit sex and violence and the combination of sex and violence. So many of these films were controversial for very good reasons,” explains Bruun Vaage.

The genre was also tied to the Second Wave of Feminism in the 1970s, as “film working through some of these new topics relating to angry women and women standing up for themselves in relation to the feminist movement.”

That was the key change that made the rape-revenge genre a milestone for women’s representation in fiction — it’s the woman who responds to the act of violence instead of a man taking revenge on her behalf.

A collection of feminist waves – and a rise in numbers of female filmmakers – later, the rape-revenge genre has moved from exploitation to a space where women rage not only against one particular sexual assault, but, in the best of cases, the general impunity of abusers in a patriarchal system.

A fight on screen and in real life

After over a century of representation of women’s anger on the big screen, 2024 has been an interesting year to stop and examine how filmmakers (particularly female filmmakers) are addressing it and portraying it.

Movies like Nightbitch, Blink Twice, The Substance, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Immaculate and MaXXXine are offering a space to explore in widely different and exciting directions what it means to be an angry woman right now: what it means to see and understand rage, no matter how ugly and messy.

For example, the two women at the centre of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance don’t rage at men but at each other.

One of the most talked-about movies in 2024, it follows a 50-year-old actress (Demi Moore) who takes a mysterious substance to create an enhanced version of herself (Margaret Qualley). Fargeat, who revitalised the rape-revenge genre in 2017 with Revenge, explores the profound self-loathing women feel as a direct consequence of society’s impossible beauty standards.

For Margrethe Bruun Vaage, it’s a tale of “internalised misogyny.”

“I think that has been explored far too little culturally, how we internalise this and how women tend to dread growing older. It also manifests as resentment and anger between women, which I think that film explores beautifully by this kind of doubling up the main character.”

The film professor points at a “male villain” in the form of Dennis Quaid’s disgusting network boss, but the key part of the film is “her own anger at her own body and her own aging” to the point of “vilifying herself.”

Supernatural body transformations seem to be one of the most successful tools to explore the frustrations, fears, concerns and rage that women live with everyday. It’s nothing new, from the menstrual horror in Carrie and the wolf-woman takes in Ginger Snaps and Raw (which captured the often terrifying teenage metamorphosis), to the New Flesh-ness of Titane and the quiet fight for control in Swallow.

Feminist body horror embraces the full complexity of women’s anger through fantasy and magical realism.

In Nightbitch, a mother’s transformation into a dog is what allows her to connect with a primal urge to be angry at her situation — an ambitious artist turned into a stay-at-home mum with an unsupportive partner and a constant feeling of failure as a woman.

“These movies are trying to articulate rage through some sort of physical manifestation,” explains Anna Bogutskaya.

“She might be turning into a dog in Nightbitch, she’s turning into a blobby monster in The Substance, and she’s giving birth to the Antichrist in Immaculate. In MaXXXine and Furiosa, I find it really interesting that their makeup is like an armour that makes them into these menacing forces.”

“I’ve always felt and known that horror and genre films have been particularly fertile ground for explorations of female rage, because it’s a very extreme emotion, and those genres are spaces that allow for playground of extreme emotions that don’t take you out of the story, and that makes sense for the characters and for those worlds,” adds Bogutskaya, who in her new book Feeding the Monster explores this mirroring between cinema and real-life fears.

And there is plenty for women to be scared of (and mad at) today.

Gender-based violence is still taking many lives every day, sexual and reproductive rights are constantly being threatened, and issues such as workplace harassment and discrimination and unpaid labour are yet to be fully addressed.

Anger is a powerful emotion when used as a catalyst for change, from the era-defining wave of personal stories that came from #MeToo movement to bring down high-profile abusers like Harvey Weinstein, to the protests against sexual violence and for women’s rights around the world.

Last month, Gisèle Pelicot waived her right to anonymity and pushed for her rape trial to be public so all the world would know about the despicable crimes committed against her by her ex-husband and other 50 men. She said she wanted to change society and expose rape culture.

“I wanted all woman victims of rape – not just when they have been drugged, rape exists at all levels – I want those women to say: Mrs Pelicot did it, we can do it too. When you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame — it’s for them,” she said in court.

When anger is articulated, exposed and shared with the world, it can ignite change. Movies help us process and even understand that anger.

The rest is on us.

This post was originally published on here