Hello, friends!

Doctober is upon us! We’ve had a joyous opening night with Joan Baez, and it’s wonderful to be looking forward to so many fabulous documentaries during the rest of the month.  Before we get to some of our opening week Doctober docs though, a couple of non-Doctober highlights: 

The story follows two American women who, finding themselves out of cash, decide to take a temporary job in a remote pub in the middle of the Australian Outback, a mining town where the men are plentiful and women are few. "Fresh meat," reads a scrawl on a board outside the pub shortly after the two women arrive. 

While the film has every mark of a thriller, perhaps even verging on horror in tone, and could have very easily gone for cheap thrills, it, instead, subverts the genre and the expectations, brilliantly playing into and with those expectations. Much like the set-up of a horror film, for example, where one character is "smart" and perceives and avoids the danger and one is "dumb" and dies early on, this film seems to be doing the same thing. But it's much more complicated than that, and the film is not just a horror film, for it is based on the real-life experiences of two Finnish young women who were really stuck in the Outback (and whose harrowing story was depicted in the documentary Hotel Coolgardie). It’s a film very much based in reality, rather than in a movie-reality.

Here, the two women do have very different reactions to the situation they find themselves in -- one of them thinks the sexism is no big deal, one of them is terrified and wants to leave -- but the film invites us to examine the deeply muddled differences between an actual threat and a perceived threat. Is every man a real threat, or is no man actually a threat and it's paranoia to think so?