Man's Inhumanity To Women In 'The Keeping Room'

Women in wartime is the central theme of Daniel Barber's The Keeping Room, a chamber piece wherein two sisters and their former female slave fend off rape and rampage during the Civil War.

The setting, for much of the film, is something of a mystery. Early on, it'd be plausible for a viewer to think the film took place in a post-apocalyptic South, where society has collapsed due to disease or zombies or the rise of technological warfare. The very first scene shows wonton violence on a country road, with total disregard for human life, especially those of women.

The story unfolds showing the three central characters scraping by in this environment, under the looming threat of abuse and murder. Augusta (Brit Marling) is the leader, the older sister of Louise (Hailee Steinfeld). They live in the skeleton of a plantation with Mad (Muna Otaru), a former slave who is treated with various levels of scorn by the two sisters.

When the younger sister is bit by a wild animal while out working the fields, Augusta risks a trip into town, where supplies are scarce and drunken soldiers are on the lookout for sexual conquest. Two Yankee soldiers eventually find their way to the sisters' rural home, at which point the film becomes a pressure cooker standoff between the women and the would-be rapists.

Visually, Augusta is transformed into a heroine with a capital H, looking like a Romantic era painting of Justice or Freedom, armed with a musket, at times shirtless. She stands as a symbol of strength against the human, or perhaps just male, urge to rape and pillage and do all manner of destruction at times of war. It's a powerful image.

Yet, the film, for all the novelty of its setting and the strength of its visuals, fails to get under the skin. Reasons for this are hard to pin down. Does Marling's southern accent just have the wrong tinge? Is it a lack of character development? Or, perhaps as some critics have noted, the film just ends right as things are about to get really, really interesting. Again, it's hard to say.

Like other movies on war, The Keeping Room is a meditation on man's inhumanity to man. What Barber, and writer Julia Hart, accomplish here is honing that focus to zero-in on the horrors faced almost exclusively by women when the soldiers comes marching in.

The Keeping Room is playing at the Lagoon Cinema.