Released 2012. Watched January 10th, 2026.
Somewhere buried in here is the bones of an excellent film about the role of father/son relationships in the upholding and perpetuation of misogynistic violence. Bob pressures Rabbit to see women as meat, collections of body parts to be raped and disassembled, most obviously displayed in the anatomical model in the background of many of the shots with Angie. (As an aside, Conor Leslie's acting as Angie is remarkable: she plays her as someone who acutely understands that Rabbit is both a victim and in a position of immense power over her. The tremor in her voice as she tearfully tells Rabbit that they can have sex if he wants is genuinely painful to watch.)
The subtle incestuous tension between Bob and Rabbit works quite well to futher display the perverse incentives at play: Rabbit has no one but Bob to seek approval from, Bob has no one but Rabbit as a constant. Their situation is a dramatization of real dynamics: Boys are taught to seek the approval of male authority figures. Male authority figures, often capricious and misogynistic, drive away everyone but the boys who need them. Family structures are revealed to be systems of power before they're any of that feel-good stuff like "saftey nets."
Of course, as anyone who has watched the film likely knows, the bullshit twist ending just fucks it all up. It's difficult to even come up with something to say about it. It's simply bad, the kind of twist that exists purely to make the audience gasp, completely out of place in what's otherwise a competently-made picture. Even the lovely, quiet, melancholy, pensive credits sequence couldn't assuage my disappointment.
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