There are many ways to describe Brimstone, the latest film from Dutch director Martin Koolhoven. Not one of them is polite. From the clanging hubris of the title card, where the film is officially billed as Koolhoven’s Brimstone, to the overbearing orchestral score, this thing oozes arrogance. It is the embarrassing work of someone convinced they have something to say but falling flat on their face: Calling it “problematic” seems colossally inadequate.
In the film’s first chapter (of four), “Revelation,” Liz (Dakota Fanning) is a mute woman living with her husband and children on a farm somewhere in the nondescript Old West. One day a new preacher appears at church, known only as The Reverend (Guy Pearce, immediately recognizable from the first shot of his greasy hair). The Reverend, we eventually learn, is her father, although by the time that’s officially revealed it is well beyond obvious. Beneath all the pretensions, this is just a movie about Guy Pearce desperately wanting to fuck his daughter.
These are the only two characters to speak of in Brimstone, a movie that is 148 excruciating minutes long. Neither of them are defined beyond their initial appearances; Liz is fleeing her seemingly omnipotent, Hannibal-esque father, whose twisted religious-sexual hangups mean he has to brutalize her, repeatedly. Rinse and repeat.
The first three chapters, all given Biblical names, of the film take us successively further back in Liz’s life, while the last concludes the story. The rationale for this jumbled timeline is unclear—Koolhoven’s script offers literally no surprises, not in theme nor dialogue nor incident, so maybe his structure was an effort to counteract the stifling deadness of the story.
Pearce’s Reverend is a maniac rapist and religious fanatic whose daughter, Joanne (she takes the name Liz later), escapes his clutches as a teenager. She then is sold into sexual slavery at a brothel called, no joke, “Frank’s Inferno,” where the women are subjected to hyperbolic amounts of abuse. Cartoon misogynist Frank (Paul Anderson), proprietor of Frank’s Inferno, doesn’t give a shit how his women are treated as long as the customer pays, a characterization taken to absurd extremes, as when a woman is summarily hanged for defending herself from life-threatening violence.
I’ve not seen anything else by Koolhoven, but judging by Brimstone he may fancy himself a Lars Von Trier-style provocateur. And in its broadest strokes—i.e. “woman is put through hell”—Brimstone is in the lineage of Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark or Dogville. It resembles all sorts of better things, in fact: the early-America claustrophobia of Robert Eggers’ The Witch, or the snowbound brutality of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. But Koolhoven categorically lacks the technical chops as a writer and director to balance a premise this tricky. It’s not enough for the film to suggest violence against women; we have to see it, again and again and again. This has a numbing effect. It ceases to mean anything, which is not ideal for a movie with violence against women as its primary concern.
Brimstone is a “feminist” movie in the worst way possible: It dumps humilation and abuse and violence on every woman within sight, yet insists, through insanely stilted monologues, that it’s actually a movie about how women are brutalized unfairly in the name of religion and stuff. It makes Mad Max: Fury Road’s “We are not things” look like a revolutionary slogan of empowerment as opposed to, like, common sense.
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