Prevenging the Patriarchy: A wild, savage look at expectations of motherhood
By Sara Elsam
Note: this contains spoilers for Prevenge
Alice Lowe’s bristling, often surreal horror-comedy, Prevenge (2016) follows an expectant mother gone murderous. As she grieves the loss of her partner, protagonist Ruth’s (Lowe) baby in utero begins coaxing her to slaughter. “Kill him,” it whispers, “or I’ll kill you”. Ruth obliges, slaying a multitude of folks linked to her husband’s untimely death. Yet there are no imminent police sirens, ever. Instead, Prevenge operates according to its own dream logic, following Ruth as she plunges further into a fever pitch of blood and lurid electro among the cleanly banality of the UK suburbs. Prevenge speaks the language of a fairy-tale, hurtling toward its grisly denouement with plenty of warning.
Ruth wears all the guises of the warm, slightly beleaguered pregnant woman: strolling down the sidewalk, pashmina flowing behind her, she arrives at a neighbourhood door, donning a cosy beanie and imploring others to save the local children. Tropes of docile motherhood are her greatest weapon. Ruth’s victims don’t have time to be scared. Mostly, their final, bloody gasps are of disbelief. And she thrills in the act of surrendering to her darkest impulses. While many of her murders are carried out with the steely eyed reserve of dissociation, Ruth grows to revel in her carnage.
Her journey takes her through a twisted pantheon of comic male horrors: seething, repugnant men; swaggering and entitled, and painfully oblivious. There is a grim satisfaction in seeing them smote. First is the lizard man, Mr. Zabek (Dan Renton Skinner), the proprietor of a local reptile shop. He stands a little too close behind Ruth, drinking in her fascination and repulsion while she taps the tanks. "That is my big fat snake,” he smirks, pointing to a colourful serpent coiled, ready in its tank. “Do you want to touch it?" Not long after, Ruth slices his throat with a long knife, leaving him to bleed out on his pet shop floor. His menagerie of slithering and crawling beasts look on, indifferent.
Next, is the utterly repugnant DJ Dan (Tom Davis). Ruth ensnares him at the local bar, leading him on with vague compliments and starry-eyed fascination. Dan laps it up, but not before throwing in a few cracks about how other women in the bar are more attractive. He doesn’t notice her tears, which well up as she grinds and laughs throughout their hollow, bleary courtship. “I fucking love fat birds… you’ve got a little bit more about you,” he waxes in the taxi back to his place. “You’re a little bit more open-minded so you don’t mind what people do to you, do you?” Then he vomits into his afro wig. Later, Ruth castrates him with a long knife, remaining expressionless as he bleeds out onto his zebra print throw. She then moves on to do the washing up for his senile, elderly mother, whom she tucks back into bed with a kiss. At first, it seems as if the baby wants her to kill particularly egregious perpetrators of the patriarchy. But her vengeance soon grows to encompass everyone - even those who aren’t so deserving of the sharp end of her long knife. It becomes evident that there is actually little rationale behind Ruth’s killings; while many of her victims are linked loosely to her husband’s death, not all are gross offenders. Her murders are, in part, her black fury, unhinged – swelling inside her, along with her foetus. The defensive, entitled voice of baby that urges her on is also a part of her: Ruth is no longer one, but two. And her impulsive, erratic ways hint at wider perceptions of the hormonal, pregnant woman, taken to a grim extreme.
She goes on to murder a corporate husk of a woman who turns her down for a job, solely based on her pregnancy, followed by the kind and conscientious flatmate of one of her other victims. The kind man in question emerges like a beacon of light among the parade of terrible people presented thus far. Unlike any other character in the film, he shows genuine empathy and concern for Ruth – even though it’s for a false backstory she has made up. He even cooks for her, a stark contrast to the men who have come before; an eternal child living with his mother, and a creep who tends to creatures locked in tanks. This man, this kind man, is different.
But even this sliver of light is tainted by Ruth’s grief. Flashbacks, of her husband’s bloody demise, paired with the prying of her psychotic baby, tear up their laughter. “He’s just pretending,” it smirks, and, although she wrestles with killing the kind man, he too is bludgeoned to death, like his housemate. Ruth’s justifications become more frenzied, and less plausible. But, unlike many other monstrous mothers that haunt horror films, from the unhinged, abusive zealot that is ‘mom’ (Piper Laurie) in Carrie (1976), to the vengeful Pamela Voorhees of the Friday the 13th series and right up to the alternatively cold and explosive Annie Graham (Toni Collette) in Hereditary (2018), we grow to sympathise with brooding, reckless Ruth, despite her inherent unlikability. This is because of the nastiness of the world around her: its leering, predatory men and condescending women - all oblivious.
Ruth is an outsider, desperately looking into a world that she has been excluded from. We watch as Ruth presses herself against a wall, listening to the grunts and sighs of the couple upstairs. “You can forget about that ever happening again,” the baby chimes in, ever controlling and spiteful.
It’s no wonder Ruth finds freedom in killing, it’s one of the few ways she wields power. Her body has submitted to the pregnancy and her agency is routinely threatened by a patriarchal, unfeeling society. “I’m not in control,” she says, “I don’t want to know what’s in there.” Despite her fear, it’s clear that the baby, projection or not, won’t tolerate sexism. It cuts down the patriarchy. But, in spite of this, it is still distant to Ruth - always quick to dampen her spirits, and of course, eager to control her.
Ruth can barely function. She moves between midwife appointments and murder, hazy with exhaustion. “At the end of the day, you’ve got this force of nature now inside you,” states the ineffective midwife, hands grasping at the air around Ruth’s belly. “Baby knows what to do. Baby will tell you what to do.” The midwife’s platitudes do nothing to alleviate Ruth’s concerns. If anything, the mindless sentimentality and black-and-white notions she wheels out only further feed Ruth’s fury. She becomes invisible behind the label of expectant motherhood, a world where it’s “all about baby”. Even her murderous ways are enacted at the behest of the life inside her. And so, what recourse does Ruth have, beyond the oblivion of wide-eyed psychotic glee; a made-up monstrous woman, raising her arms like death wings as she plunges towards her prey? She finds her power in the wilderness, a nihilistic surrender.
There are moments where Ruth tries to meditate, quell the voices, within and outside. And when she does, the mantra “Everyone is good,” leads her into a rage. Ruth’s world does not offer solutions, only an impotent scream, and the further loss of self.
What Ruth does is, perhaps, understandable. Because there is little place for the tumult of grief within day to day society. “I would swap her [her foetus] to have him back,” Ruth explodes, raw. “She can’t hear you,” responds the midwife, her tone condescending. No solace for Ruth, just the routine of being tended to as a vessel for Baby.
From the first time we meet Ruth, she is shown as a vulnerable single mother; sitting, hollow eyed by a fire, flashbacks of death skittering across her eyes. The camera zooms out to reveal her large, round belly, at odds with the black fury and emptiness in her eyes. Ruth is ill and she is frightened only exhilarated and joyful when driven to kill at the behest of the baby.
In contrast to a host of films that demonise the process of child-bearing – from Rosemary’s Baby (1968) to Devil’s Due(2014) – the true villain in Prevenge is not the baby, or the grisly nature of child birth, but the weight and expectation of motherhood, and the isolation of grief. It is these that spawn Baby’s lust for carnage. Beyond the grief and devilish fury that consumes Ruth and splatters her victims on a myriad of lino flooring across the Midlands, there is a strange hope. Ruth has ransacked the sanctified image of the mother-to-be. Resplendent with fuzzy love and docility she is not. Ruth has transgressed into something deadly.
Although it is presented as madness, not glorified, but messy, nasty, and riddled with her own inadequacies, it is still somehow transcendent, tapping into a darker, earthly power. She becomes an elemental being of sex and death, and all savagery; an effective salve, for the sanitised version of motherhood propagated in culture. In a sense, Ruth is no longer a slave to those expectations, nor does she define herself through what she lacks. Instead, she sees beyond the sentiment-soaked propaganda of motherhood and into the unknowables of pregnancy and impending single parenthood. There’s something primal and terrifying here, held beneath a thin veneer, used to keep the realities of grief and natal depression at bay. But, in submitting to her rage, Ruth is freed.
Sara Elsam is a journalist and broadcaster that has had work featured at The Guardian, BBC, Variety and Eurogamer, where they've covered everything from socialist Monopoly to haunted video games. They live in rural Wales with their partner, fluffy cat-son and many chickens. Sara loves Dungeons & Dragons, all things horror and psychedelic rock music. Their dice are definitely cursed. Twitter handle is @moogski
We've been going independently for years now, and so far have self-financed every single project. In order to do more work, and continue supporting amazing filmmakers in the genre space, we've launched a Patreon.
If you are able to support us and the work we do on Patreon, we'd truly and deeply appreciate it.