‘Look What You Made Me Do’: IDFA Review

Dir/scr: Coco Schrijber. Netherlands. 2022. 84mins

The pressing subject of femicide – and less-common mariticide – comes under the microscope in Look What You Made Me Do, the fourth feature documentary by Dutch writer-director Coco Schrijber (First Kill) in a career which stretches back more than two decades. An interlocking triptych of portraits in which women who killed abusive partners recount the circumstances and impacts of their crimes — interwoven with a more ambiguous fourth strand of interview — it premieres in IDFA sidebar focusing on masculinity. Further festival and small-screen exposure will likely follow via events and platforms favouring social and female issues, despite a sometimes uneasy blend of journalistic and poetic elements.

Each of the four protagonists come across as sympathetic and engaging

The film centres on Rosalba (Italian), Laura (Finnish) and Rachel (Dutch), who each calmly relate how they were driven to homicide. The fourth speaker, who is identified in the end-credits only as “The Woman in Red,” and has her identity masked by visual distortions, talks of the mounting desperation which is driving her towards a similarly drastic way out. In these interviews, Schrijber takes the approach of interlocutory invisibility, with her questions edited out and no audible reactions. She allows the women to speak without challenge or inquiry and each of the four protagonists come across as sympathetic and engaging. 

Working with seasoned editor Gys Zevenbergen, Schrijber intersperses the interview sections with mainly wordless sequences involving banal-looking locations — the kind of unremarkable places where femicide can and does take place on a daily basis (an oft-repeated statistic here states that 30,000 women are killed by their partners around the world per annum.) It is the norm for shots to be held for several seconds after their point has been made, contributing to an overall sense of darkness: these myriad pauses help pad out the running-time to 84 minutes, at least some of which could perhaps more profitably have been given over to a mention of what consequences ensued for the protagonists (an entire documentary could be made about Rosalba’s tortuous relationship with the Italian justice system).

As it is, the film is strong on mood but can be light on insight: Schrijber is especially fond of showing fake blood spattering across or running down great paintings of women, for example.

Marc Lizier’s sombre score, which ranges from pulsatingly doomy electronica to more hackneyed passages of melancholy piano, can sit uneasily alongside a small handful of archival pop samplings, while Vincent Sinceretti’s sound-design favours an eclectic array of nerve-jangling aural effects.

It’s very telling that the most powerful sequences, piecemeal glimpses of CCTV footage graphically recording a horrifying murder of a young woman in 2018, are allowed to play in total, shattering silence. In terms of structure Schrijber’s most successful gambit  involves what appear to be chapter-numbers flashing up every fifteen minutes or so, but whose actual import is revealed as significantly more upsetting.