Eight years after she was last seen wandering off to face an uncertain future with her new family, “the woman,” played as ever by Pollyanna McIntosh, returned for a third outing. But this time, the focus of the film has shifted to the next generation, to the now teenage Darlin’ Cleek, adopted by the woman at the end of Lucky McKee’s The Woman (2011), while McIntosh’s feral matriarch plays a smaller role, McIntosh busy elsewhere writing and directing the film.
In the years since the last film, Peggy and Socket have died, leaving Darlin’ – believed to be sixteen but looking a lot younger – and her adopted mother living in the woods. As the film opens the woman sends Darlin’ (Lauryn Canny) to a hospital (we don’t know it yet but they’re looking to abduct a baby, something that the woman has been obsessed with since the first film in the series, Offspring (2009). Darlin’ is run over by an ambulance and admitted to the hospital where a kindly nurse, Tony (Cooper Andrews) tries to get through to her. Feral, unwashed and unable to communicate in anything other than grunts, Darlin’ is packed off to a Catholic boarding school to be “tamed” and schooled in the ways of God and civilisation. Befriending one of her fellow students, the rebellious Billy (Maddie Nichols) and taken under the protective wing of Sister Jennifer (Nora-Jane Noone), Darlin’s gradually acclimatises to her new way of life. But she has to fend off the slimy and abusive Bishop (Bryan Batt) while all the time her adoptive mother is cutting a bloody swathe through the city in search of her “daughter.”
Unsurprisingly, the problematic pseudo-feminism of The Woman comes into much sharper focus here. Darlin’ (a fantastic performance from Canny, who perfectly mimics the distinctive body language and facial mannerisms perfected by McIntosh for her character) is as abused as the woman was in McKee’s film, but it’s a subtler, more insidious form of abuse. While conventional (i.e. white, male, Christian) society does its misguided best to “tame” Darlin’ and force her into the pre-ordained societal slot they’ve decided she belongs in, a strange but just about functioning matriarchy – a group of female alcoholics sheltering in a derelict building – unquestioningly accept the woman as one of the own, another ostracised and marginal woman failed by the mainstream. Darlin’ is indoctrinated by the Catholic church, terrorised by their tales of the Devil and, in an explicit reference to the real life cases of abuse that blighted the church in the 2010s, left in the care of a paedophile priest.
Darlin’ isn’t the monster here – she’s a wild, free-spirited nature child that the buttoned-down recovering junkie Sister Jennifer would love to be and which the church and other agents of the patriarchy (the real monster) are unable to understand let alone control. The only man in the film who comes close to empathising with Darlin’ is Tony (Andrews is also excellent) as the nurse who first encounters Darlin’ and who by virtue of being gay is also a marginalised figure whose relationship with his husband Robert (Damon Lipari) is frowned upon by the Bishop. The attempts to civilise Darlin’ aren’t undertaken in any Christian, well-intentioned way but as a cynical attempt by the oily, constantly smirking Bishop to attract press attention and save his school from threatened closure – thus ensuring that his abuses are never exposed.
Darlin’ is a hugely ambitious film and McIntosh attacks it with enthusiasm. At times it lashes out at random and sometimes loses focus in its righteous anger but one can’t fault it for its aspirations. McIntosh knows the character of the woman inside out and would have been forgiven for putting her front and centre but commendably, she keeps her on the fringes of the action, finally unleashing her in an audacious and bloody finale as her new clan follows her into the church where the Bishop is inducting another group of potential young victims, only for them to desert her when she shows her true nature.
The film is less confrontationally violent than its predecessors though McIntosh doesn’t skimp on the gore. She just uses it sparingly, peppering it throughout the film to punctuate and counterpoint the more insidious psychological violence being meted out to Darlin’. There’s room for some humour too – the woman’s first journey in a car, initially screeching with fear, later seen with her head thrust out of the window like a dopey dog enjoying the breeze, is hilarious as is her brief but unexpected encounter with a hospital clown (Jeff Pope).
The film ends on an ambiguous note with room for at least one entry in this most unconventional of franchises. The fates of both Darlin’ and the woman are left deliberately unclear and one can only hope that if they do decide to give the woman a fourth outing that McIntosh is in charge again. Darlin’ is by far the best of the series, beautifully photographed by another woman, Halyna Hutchins, and full to the brim with great performances. McIntosh proves to be as adept a director as she is an actor and one can only hope that Darlin’ is a success and allows her to explore her new path further.
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