Five tales of violent, ambitious, brilliant women – what you should watch and read this week
Two vengeful women in love, a daughter on a mission to save her father, female spies and two ambitious wives.
This article was first published in our email newsletter Something Good, which brings you a summary every fortnight of the best things to watch, visit and read, as recommended and analysed by academic experts. Click here to receive the newsletter direct to your inbox.
The trailer for Love Lies Bleeding features the dark synth pulse of Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat. From the very first notes, I had a sense of what to expect from the film. The song is a queer anthem about the need to flee small town intolerance in order to really live. Its wailing apex expresses the feeling of giving in to impulses and feelings, and pursuing pleasure. It often scores scenes of hedonistic revelry; think dimly lit clubs, all sweat and writhing bodies. It is dark, gay and sexy – and so is Love Lies Bleeding.
The film is a violent neo-noir thriller by British filmmaker Rose Glass. Set in 1989, it tells the story of reclusive gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart), who falls for Jackie (Katy O'Brian), a bodybuilder passing through her small New Mexico town on her way to Las Vegas. Love, drugs and murder follow. Our reviewer, dubbed it a “visual and aural spectacle” that creates “a visceral cinematic experience, which is at once absorbing and repulsive”.
It’s a stylish (would you expect less from indie production company A24?) lesbian body horror that, once these star-crossed lovers find each other, moves at the speed of a truck that’s had its brake cut and a brick placed on the accelerator.
Read more: Love Lies Bleeding: this vengeful queer romance is a visceral cinematic experience
Men who need saving
If you can’t get enough of gore, then we recommend you watch Amazon’s new series Fall Out. Adapted from the wildly popular game series of the same name, the show is set in a future US where nuclear war has left the surface world seemingly uninhabitable.
The show follows Lucy (Ella Purnell), who has grown up in an underground nuclear vault. Her life is turned upside down when her father is kidnapped by surviving surface dwellers, and she has to venture into the world above to retrieve him.
The world of the vaults is frozen at the time that the bombs dropped. It’s like a corny, futuristic 1950s comedy – all kitchy and sugary, like a live-action The Jetsons. People really say things like “okie dokie” and they love something called “jello surprise”. This world has made Lucy wide-eyed, naive and wholly unprepared for the world above, which resembles a gritty 50s western with added radiation – dusty, lawless and full of danger and monsters.
It’s a funny, quirky, violent show. Like the other recent popular game-to-TV adaptation The Last of Us, its asks us to question who we consider the bad guys.
Our reviewer, an expert in gaming and a fan of the Fallout series, loved it. They felt it managed to incorporate some of the best elements of the game while also expanding on the lore of the world. I loved the show and all the surprise reveals and twists left me excited for the second series.
In the frozen 50s culture of the vaults, I imagine James Bond would be all the rage – sexism and all. Thankfully in the real world, Bond has moved on and changed. In the new book in the ever-expanding 007 universe, A Spy Like Me, there are more kick-ass women than ever.
The series was taken over by Kim Sherwood in 2021 and this is the second in her Double O trilogy. At the beginning of the series Bond has been kidnapped and a new cohort of 00 agents are tasked with retrieving him. In A Spy Like Me, there’s a network of international smugglers wreaking havoc on global security who might be connected to be the paramilitary organisation Rattenfänger, who are suspected of Bond’s capture.
The book has everything you would expect of a Bond thriller. High action, international travel, top-class tech. It’s full of artful allusions to Fleming’s books and our reviewer also found it to be a beautifully crafted literary novel that centres brilliant female characters, including a smart and thoughtful Moneypenny who really takes charge.
Read more: A Spy Like Me: Kim Sherwood's evocative and thrilling addition to the James Bond canon
Ambitious women
Another much-loved (or detested, depending on your reading) character recently rescued from the peripheries is Lady Macbeth, in Val McDemid’s latest book. Queen Macbeth mixes Shakespeare’s ambitious scheming wife with Scotland’s real Queen Grouch. McDermid’s Queen survives the angry armies seeking revenge on Macbeth for his murders – and becomes a queen on the run.
Our reviewer, an expert in hated women like witches, found it to be a short and sharp tale that “does everything it can to upset the narrative we think we know to tell us a magical new story”.
Our final recommendation is another story about an ambitious woman who pushes her husband. Challengers follows Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), once a promising tennis player turned coach, who has transformed her husband into a world-famous grand slam champion. Wanting to help him get over a losing streak, she makes him play a challenger event, which ends up becoming about more than tennis as he’s up against her former boyfriend, Patrick.
Our reviewer, an expert in in the psychology of competition, found this tense film a compelling portrayal of ambition and the intensity of competition in sport and love. When the trailer first dropped, there was a lot of buzz about its eroticism, but Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers is a much more complex portrait of the pressures of sport and relationships than expected.
Read more: Challengers: new Zendaya tennis film reviewed by an expert in the psychology of competition
