Julia

Released: 2014

MPAA rating: R

Running time: 1 hr. 35 mins.

Julia (Ashley C Williams) is a mousy, under-stated woman who goes on a date one night with horrific results.  This is how the movie opens.  After having her world devastated by the incident, she meets a woman, Sadie (Tahnya Tozzi), who lets her know about a therapist who has a radical program to help women who are trying to deal with rape.  She meet the therapist and soon finds herself involved in some strange cultish group who, um, REALLY hate men.  At first glance, it seems like a rehashing of the storyline of "I Spit On Your Grave" (which I have not seen, so I can't speak directly to that), but it goes in some very unique and strange directions.  The film was well-written, well-directed and, actually, very well-acted, but I thought it had some major problems.  First, the main character of Julia is in just about every scene, but has very little dialogue.  I get that she starts 

off mousy and is later dealing with major trauma, but it just bothered me that she had so little to say. 

It became just too much of a distraction to me.  Add that they did the old movie trope of "take off the glasses and let her hair down and SURPRISE!, she's beautiful!". The other major issue I had, and I'll try to word this carefully, is that the rape scenes (mostly shown in flashbacks) are less brutal than they should be.  Don't get me wrong, the scenes fall short of actually being titillating, but I didn't really feel the horror of rape was there.  The final issue was that the movie was at times just too stylistic.  Some of the set design and lighting tried too hard to seem like it was portraying the seedy underbelly of New York City.  Overall, though, the silence of the main character took me out of it the most.  

Grade: C