You got your misogyny in my class warfare and anti-colonialism. You got your class warfare and anti-colonialism in my misogyny. I always say that the best horror really is a metaphor for deeper societal issues, but then I see a movie like Penumbra and cannot tell if the filmmaker is on the side of the angels, should be given a wide berth as someone punching down or is actually a genius intersectional commentary on the shifting ways that different facets of identity are a form of power or a possible point of victimization—like the horror Lady Macbeth. I actually do not believe the latter, but I am willing to entertain the thought.
I first learned about Penumbra when I was watching The Corridor, a Canadian horror film that was far from perfect, but definitely had seeds of genius. There were so many great previews so I decided to continue to broaden my horizons and give this film a chance. A woman stumbles across a doomsday cult triggered by a solar eclipse. It gave me Rosemary’s Baby and Cthulu chills, and I definitely was interested in learning more about the cult. At ninety minutes, it was about the right run time for a movie that could be a disaster or be brilliant. I immediately added it close to the top of my queue.
I may be an American, but I am a Northern American so the reason for my ambiguous feeling about Penumbra is because I am certain that my ignorance of South America meant that a lot of the subtext got lost in translation. The protagonist, the woman from the preview, is from Spain, a biased, ambitious, elitist, greedy liar who is generally unlikeable-a post-modern colonizer. I actually had no problem with making her the worst because if women are people, and people are the worst, then women should not only be depicted as the worst, but only filling movies with good women perpetuates this myth that only women have the burden of morality. The real trick is if she gets treated similarly to the biased man—can we still root for her as a human being in spite of being a horrible woman just on the basis of shared humanity or when she gets her just desserts, will it not be rooted in gender, but something that all members of the audience can enjoy. It is one of the reasons that I loved BlacKkKlansman. Spike Lee found a way to roast the racist women without being misogynistic so any woman could rejoice in their ridicule without feeling as if Lee was actually denigrating women, not racism.
Unfortunately Penumbra definitely gave me the vibe (and I am willing to concede that I misconstrued the filmmakers’ true intentions) of a movie that wanted to take her down a peg by reminding the protagonist that she is a woman. Who do you think you are being biased when you are being a woman? I know that among people of color, I definitely have a similar thought rooted in reality when I see a person of color acting as if he or she possesses white privilege in political stances or personal life. The movie plays on the fact that women are sexually harassed, considered crazy when they respond with any level of anger to inappropriate conduct or not believed when they make accusations. When I noticed that the movie began setting up these elements outside of the horror premise, the cult invading the apartment that she is trying to sell, I began to worry, especially since the film was able to make similar points limiting it within the horror context, which is the only reason that I considered it gloating, not social commentary. The movie lays it on thick, really wants to punish her and wants others to enjoy her downfall-poor Argentinians specifically.
If Penumbra’s real goal was punishing bias, the film could have accomplished the same goal without the extraneous characters’ pleasure of vengeance. The extraneous characters are just as biased as she is, i.e. sexist, but that is not the bias that gets punished in the film, and horror is about punishment and pleasure. The scene that accomplishes giving the protagonist her woman wake up call without rewarding sexist beliefs of other wrong people is when one of the cult members pretends to be her husband and people outside of the cult ignore her pleas for help. This scene is my nightmare, the way that society does not notice or care when a man drags off a woman asking for help. It is the one thing that made the remake of Fright Night terrifying to me. A woman’s agency can be erased because of assumptions about relationships. The presence of a man in a relationship creates a veneer of ownership, hierarchy and negation.
There can be an argument within Penumbra’s context that the protagonist is an unreliable narrator, which would erase the issue of the filmmakers not punishing sexism, but would then raise the issue that the filmmakers did not do a great job laying the foundation for this plot twist. She is still one woman and how would she lift the dead weight of another person, have the time in her brief visit to set this elaborate crime up. To effectively set this up, I need news reports of weird crap that happened in Spain while she was there like Camino. When I got to the denouement, it felt anti-climactic and as if I wasted my time.
Visually Penumbra can be confusing because during some of the physical struggles, I could not tell what was happening. On the other hand, the film was definitely paying homage to Brian de Palma and Hitchcock during the scenes inside the building. I was disappointed that we did not get more time learning about the cult, their goals, etc. It reminded me of a violent Heaven’s Gate, but I thought that it was largely a missed opportunity to really nail the dehumanization of people of a certain gender, race or nationality to use them as objects during ones’ journey, which would have added texture to the colonization theme. Unfortunately the cult’s mythology is rushed over and not well thought out. Also I am hoping that this plot point ended up on the cutting room floor, but I felt as if the film was making a point about the legacy of colonization, and I did not consider it a coincidence that her father’s apartment just happened to have a mural of some importance to a doomsday cult. I would have liked it if the film had linked it back to her family history in some way or at least fleshed out the historicity of the cult so even if the connection was unknown, it was present.
I was rooting for Penumbra, but ultimately it was a letdown. There are some gorgeous women in various states of undress and some even get oiled up so if that is your thing, go for it, but I would not advise it. Maria Nela Sinisterra is a gorgeous, black woman and only gets a few seconds of screen time, but damn, she should be an international star.