Dutch film director and actor Halina Reijn says her new movie exploring dark power dynamics in female sexuality offers nuance and universality, but understands it may be challenging for some.
Her latest work Instinct looks at the boundary-breaking sexual relationship between a female psychologist and a violent male sex offender.
Photo: Kris Dewitte
It stars Carice van Houten (who plays the character 'Melisandre' in Game of Thrones), one of Reijn's best friends.
Houten and Reijn established Man Up, the production company behind the movie, with a view to producing content from a female perspective, giving special attention to edgier stories often avoided because of shame or fear.
Instinct is screening at the New Zealand International Film Festival, which runs until August 16.
Reijn tells Lynn Freeman the pair wanted to stop being muses in movies and direct the content instead.
“We both had really beautiful careers as actresses - Carise mainly in film and I mainly on the stage. I was playing all these classical roles… and all these roles were written by men and mostly directly in my case by Ivo van Hove, who is a great theatre director, but they were all men.
“I loved working in these plays, but I always felt like I wanted to create something from a female perspective.”
After successfully writing a book with van Houten as co-author, the pair decided to work on setting up the company together.
The name Man Up is ironic; a humorous call for females to take a lead, she says. Securing finance for the project was initially difficult because it came before the MeToo movement, with the concept considered peripheral and their credentials unproven.
“We basically started with a TV show that we are only finishing now, as it took as a long time to get finance because everyone was a like ‘what are you doing?’ We wanted to create a TV show about female trafficking and prostitution because Amsterdam is famous for that…
“They were a little suspicious of these two actresses thinking that they could create something at all, so then we had some fights. But then after MeToo things became much more open… and we started to prove ourselves.”
The TV series Red Light is now about to be screened. However, making it was a drawn-out process, so the pair decided to create an arthouse movie on the side as they waited on finance.
Instinct follows a seasoned psychologist who becomes intensely infatuated by the serial rapist she is treating in prison.
The idea for the movie came from a news documentary, which revealed a phenomenon of professionals working in institutional situations who ended up crossing similar boundaries.
“Why is this so compelling to us? Because we just can’t believe that someone who is highly educated like this woman, who was supposed to be super intelligent and know exactly what she’s doing and supposed to recognise every red flag, that someone like her would fall for someone like him. It’s something we cannot understand,” she says.
Themes of power, violence and sexuality intrigue Reijn.The complexity of female sexuality and the paradoxical reality of life portrayed in the movie has been challenging for some, she says. The risqué nature of Instinct as a story of female experience also lies in the fact it is not a tale of the patriarchy’s abuse of powerful positions. It instead offers a nuanced look at the wider human experience.
“Taking a story like that helps me to raise these questions about who are we as women,” Reijn says.
“If you think about the fact that, for instance heart medication – it turns out that we as women have been given the wrong dose, in a lot of cases, of heart medication because all the tests in the past have always been done on men. So, what do we even know about women?
“We don’t even know about them, their sexuality. In this confusing, beautiful time where we can truly get to know ourselves, I think it’s very important that we show these kinds of stories, where we are vulnerable.
“I think a lot of women when they watch our film feel less alone at the end of it, but if you are not at ease at looking at the grey areas sometimes, looking at the nuance, then this film is very disturbing.
“If you want to divide the world into good and evil, then women at this point should be strong and men should just be really nice. I don’t think that is the reality.”
There is no victim and perpetrator in the film. The conventional victimhood narrative is replaced with the suggestion that early trauma suffered by the pair formed a psycho-sexual polarity that ends up pulling two damaged, pathological people together.
“She is just as dangerous as he is and that really fascinates me,” she says.
The characters' similarities become apparent in the movie, both having a powerful ability to intuitively read emotion and understand what makes a person tick.
But, whereas she attempts to use her ability empathically to nurture recovery and growth – and maybe as a means of rescuing others to avoid dealing with her own pain - his ability is instrumentalised in a drive to objectify, seduce, manipulate, take and destroy. The magnetism of the psychopath to a vulnerable woman is displayed in chilling fashion during the film's close-up scenes.
The ensuing toxic drama of control and sexual powerplay makes the movie compelling and acts as an extreme reminder of how our own emotional frailties can leave us open to compulsively and repeatedly making bad calls with the ‘wrong’ partner.
“They are both very vulnerable and I think it’s interesting to watch them… I think we all recognise that we can be very destructive, even though we don’t want to, and we know better,” Reijn says.
The director says the notion of ‘foreign films’ as a common descriptor and genre is becoming less relevant as these flicks appear more regularly on Netflix. The movies are transcending borders, language and narrow, often marginal categories by virtue of increasing universal appeal.
The new opportunities offered by movie-streaming platforms keen to take greater risks and offer alternative content generally, makes it an exciting time for creative directors and screen writers, she agrees.
“I’m super excited by it. I feel also as a woman, doors are very open right now. As a female director you get so many opportunities internationally… In the end of course, the biggest thrill for me is to create something from scratch.”
