Review: ‘The Furies’ buries the patriarchy in female retribution

“It’s a fucked up world full of fucked up men,” Taylor Ferguson (Glitch, Homecoming Queens) speaks her truth in one of the film’s crucial emotionally-thematic scenes. The Furies, directed by Tony D’Aquino (Two Twisted, Alpha Male), is far more than an uncomfortably-gory slasher flick, often feeling like Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Freddy vs. Jason. But if blood-soaked, eye-popping carnage candy is your speed, this briskly-paced romp will certainly satisfy your wildest fantasies. While D’Aquino situates his 82-minute woodlands excursion smack in the middle of slasher conventions, he also makes sure to puncture the arteries of cultural and social relevance: “Fuck Patriarchy” is written in bright red spray paint in one of the early scenes, an underlining motif that glues the entire narrative together.

Then, there’s the utilization of The Furies, or Erinyes, known in Greek Mythology as three goddesses who punished men for crimes against nature. In D’Aquino’s vision, those Furies are Ferguson’s Sheena, Linda Ngo (Top of the Lake, Mako Mermaids) as Rose and Airlie Dodds (Ready for This, Killing Ground) as Kayla, our lead protagonist whose debilitating epilepsy layers a disturbing distortion to her character arc. Dodds’ performance is shaded with excellent subtleties, owed to a largely organic, emotion-heavy script that seeks to uphold the female view. When Kayla finally cracks beneath the weight of a Hostel-bent game of cat ‘n mouse, her raw disgust for men hangs thick off the camera. Even more, the cinematography is chilling in much the same way as Ari Aster’s summer hit, Midsommar. The brightness of daylight and a generally-earthy color palette is enough to make you squirm; the woodsy location is one that’s been beaten into the ground, yet D’Aquino manages to rip it out at the roots.

D’Aquino goes one step further in his stylistic foundation. He also draws connections to Beauty & the Beast, perhaps calling upon the original fairy tale, which was published in 1740 and later adapted to stage, film and TV countless times. The forest proves to be an ample vehicle through which to carve out his own fantastical devices, framing Kayla’s illness as a means to an end, and paralleling the undercurrent of women rising up against a patriarchal system. Reportedly, The Furies is his first feature film, as he told blogger Luke Farrell last summer, so the camera work, sliding from extended static shots to quick flickers to further dilute what is reality vs. fantasy, exhibits a filmmaker at the top of his craft. Oh, and there is hopes for a sequel, which, given the very twisty ending, is quite exciting.

The premise is simple: masked men stalk abducted women in the woods. D’Aquino implements images of a pig, an owl, a wood-man and others to create an almost bizarre stage-like presentation and a mythology all its own; it could be as-if Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was sent through a Leatherface meat-packing plant and later coated in The Hunt-like metallic. It’s unapologetically planted amidst these trying sociopolitical times without every feeling like he’s hopping atop a soap box, and the film’s gruesomely impressive special effects supply a smorgasbord of blood, guts and gore for every horror voyeur. In all, D’Aquino doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, but he does punch the viewer right in the gut.

The Furies hits Shudder this week.

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