It’s exactly halfway through the trailer for Maria Schrader’s She Said, an adaptation of Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor’s nonfiction opus about sexual abuse in Hollywood, that the name “Harvey Weinstein” is finally uttered. An unnecessary expository moment in a bleak, obvious retelling of Weinstein’s crimes that appears far less interested in ongoing institutional mistreatment than it does the dramatic potential of its antagonist.
Tonally identical to Jay Roach’s Bombshell, She Said positions itself as a tense newsroom drama, following New York Times journalists Twohey (Carey Mulligan) and Kantor (Zoe Kazan) as they attempt to amass testimony against Weinstein. The pair struggle to convince women to come forward, soon discovering that they are ensnared in settlements, payouts, and latent lawsuits. “The only way these women are gonna go on the record is if they all jump together,” declares Twohey, with Mulligan still coasting along her Promising Young Woman drawl.