Lou

dir: Anna Foerster

2022

Lou is the kind of ovaries-to-the-wall action flick starring an older American tv / film movie icon (at least to me) that you rarely if ever get to see these days.

Many action flicks come out every year. They’re perfect for people who hate too much dialogue or speaking or people reaching out to each other across the emotional divide that seems infinite until it isn’t. Lou is tough and uncompromising, and almost dares you not to like it.

Lou (the great Allison Janney) is a no bullshit, no sentiment woman living on an island in the Pacific North West. She has a dog and doesn’t even really seem to like the dog that much, but she does feed him, usually fresh deer that she kills herself.

With her BARE HANDS. Joking. She shoots them THEN finishes them off.

There is a storm coming to the island (of course). On the news that she spies in a local store, or it might have been the bank, Ronald Reagan is denying that any of the Iran / Contra stuff ever happened, or having any involvement in any of it, which was of course a lie. Lou is looking at the screen like maybe she can melt Reagan with her rage alone. It’s funny, because you get the impression that, for whatever reason, Lou personally knows how much what Reagan is saying is pure bullshit.

It’s also telling us when this is all happening. It’s the 80s. There aren’t a lot of Kate Bush needle drops or Madonna hairstyles or fingerless gloves, or kids playing Dungeons & Dragons. It’s a just a time and place with no mobiles, and few ways to get around on an island without a vehicle.

We watch, as the film begins, an entire sequence where Lou, for reasons of her own, digs up something on her property, burns some stuff, writes a letter to someone, then puts the barrel of a rifle under her chin and prepares to pull the trigger. The story then winds back the day leading up to this moment, and shows it to us again in more detail before it progresses any further.

Lou is on her own with her dog in her house, but on a nearby property she has a tenant who has a young daughter. That woman Hannah’s (Jurnee Smollet) daughter Vee (Ridley Asha Bateman) is very good at hide and seek. Almost suspiciously good. There’s some mutterings about Hannah’s absent husband, and you get the feeling he might have died of cancer or something, as the mother works up the courage to tell her daughter what’s actually happened to her dad. Vee is at that age where it seems entirely appropriate to lie to a child, possibly all of the time, because it’s just easier that way.

Hannah may even have moved on already, seemingly having some kind of relationship with a local handyman, who is around long enough only to show that a) this new relationship isn’t going to last and b) Hannah’s husband is very much not out of the picture.

There is a (minor) trick when the flick really gets started, which tells us and not Hannah that whatever Hannah’s husband is doing to her and her daughter, it’s not all about them. He’s leaving notes, with Farsi script, for Lou.

Huh? Wuh? Buh?

When we return to the moment where Lou was about to blow her own fucking brains out, the power is out, and Vee is missing. Hannah bursts in on Lou looking for Vee, but after barking out some orders about what they should do next, Lou indicates clearly that she has skills and / or training; the kind of special set of skills only the worst people who work for the American government seem to have, that seem very common in action flicks.

What’s strange is that this outburst from Hannah is enough to encourage Lou to change her mind about voluntary euthanasia. Also, up until this moment, Lou has shown no positive emotions towards Hannah or Vee. If anything, she seems to loathe them. At one point she nearly runs over Vee, and barely seems to care.

Is it because of racism? Who knows? I’m sure Lou has her reasons. But when Vee is kidnapped, Lou is full bore about stopping this other guy and his misogynist, anti-child agenda.

It turns out, based on what Hannah tells us, that her husband is a psychopath called Philip (Logan Marshall-Green), who’s not only a wanted war criminal but someone who’s not very nice either. Because Lou knows all and sees all, she bluntly observes that Hannah was being domestically abused and tortured by Phillip, and then Lou even more brutally blames her for staying.

Hannah explains, instead of getting defensive, that yeah, people blame the woman that stays, as if she has a choice, as if someone like Philip accepts their partner leaving without exacting revenge, or threatening to kill her and her kid. But that she had hoped, for the longest time, that if she loved him enough it could heal the brokenness inside him, heal the damage done to him.

It's a fatal mistake too many women with no choices have not survived, whether here in Australia or in the Pacific North West. Each week here another woman is murdered by her partner, her estranged partner, or someone the cops were told many times has said they were going to kill, to no avail.

The brutality with which Lou inflicts these hateful questions upon Hannah is utterly lacking in basic human feeling, but there’s also a deep irony to what Lou is doing.

For all that this is an action flick, I haven’t even mentioned the stuff that goes down. Lou, whatever her actual skill set, is even more brutal with her fighting skills than she is with her cutting remarks. Philip, the vicious ex-husband, has some other jerks helping him, and Lou gets to show us how good she is at killing people with household objects.

Janney fights with a ferocity, with such a vibe of “I give zero fucks if I survive this” that I genuinely think she might have killed some people during the making of this flick. I feel like she didn’t even use a stunt double in some of those scenes. I nervously read through the credits at the end of the flick, for the message about “no people or animals were harmed during the making of this movie”, only to be greeted with some kind of addendum, possible written in blood, saying “except a couple of guys who fucked around, and now they found out”.

I’m too scared to find out what it means, in case she comes after me.

For all that Lou kills some people, there is not wall to wall action in this flick. Its scattered manhunt format, of Philip lugging his kid around, and Lou and Hannah on their trail, doesn’t allow for that much confrontation. But when it happens, it’s fucking brutal, and for all her steeliness, Lou cops a lot of damage.

Unlike most stories where there’s a curmudgeon at the heart of the story, this isn’t a redemption story about a person disappointed or harmed by life who gradually gets to reconnect, open up, get some catharsis and all that bullshit just from looking after or trying to save a kid. Lou’s heart is purest stone, and nothing, not even a cute moppet will thaw that out.

She can still do what she does, as brutally as she can, to make up somewhat for her callous past.

No tears, though. No fucking tears.

I have seen Allison Janney, multiple award winner, give such incredible performances in so many movies and tv shows for so long it seems redundant to even say “Allison Janney is a terrifying joy to watch in most things, and doubly so here”, but she is a ferocious and steely eyed joy to watch in this flick, as in most. I can’t imagine that making this movie was an easy experience, and I admire her commitment to the role in that she never seems to vary, not one iota, from who the character is.

Jurnee Smollet, great in the recent Birds of Prey as Black Canary, gives a much more personal, much more human performance here. It’s not hard for any actor to play the concerned parent “I must do anything to get my kid back” role, because, let’s face it, it’s easy as fuck and almost anyone can relate to it. But the way she struggles to articulate the complex tightrope she had to walk in order to try to save her kid and herself, and keeps it real, is a thing of beauty. She has to express the humanity that’s lacking from most of the other characters.

There are only 4 real characters in this flick, not counting the helpful sheriff (Matt Craven), who’s obsessed with those copper wristbands that, I assure you, do nothing for your arthritis. One’s a sweet child, too young to really understand what’s going on. The other is a human woman trying to save herself and her kid, and not lose her humanity in the process.

That leaves two characters left. They’re both monsters. One monster wants to kill the other in order to save the mother and daughter. The other, like many men who murder their families, wants to kill everyone, because he doesn’t want anyone to live, or ever be happy, because he’s incapable of it.

That’s not as forgettable as the usual mindless action flick. This doesn’t feel like that. Director Anna Foerster does really well with what she’s got, and everyone, especially Janney, come out of this pretty well. It’s a harsh survivalist kind of action flick that’s 90 per cent of the time in nature. And that goes pretty far in the argument of whether nature or nurture makes monsters, because…we got all kinds here.

8 times Lou is the wrong woman to fuck with out of 10

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“I wish I could say that some good came from what I did. In truth I left the world a more dangerous place.” - Lou