‘Black Eyed Susan’ Is A Shallow Attempt At Interrogating Toxic Masculinity [Fantasia 2024 Review]
After 21 years, filmmaker Scooter McCrae has returned with his latest feature film Black Eyed Susan, which had its world premiere at the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival. However, whatever transgressive edge he once had has dulled, as his latest film is a shallow attempt to discuss issues of toxic masculinity, addiction, and the terrifying possibilities of artificial intelligence.
Damian Maffei plays Derek, a down-on-his-luck ride-share driver who lives out of his car and is recently separated from his wife, presumably spurred on by his alcoholism. Serendipitously, he crosses paths with an old friend, Gilbert (Marc Romeo), who offers him a job: to help test and develop a new BDSM sex doll named Susan (Yvonne Emilie Thälker). More specifically, Derek is meant to train Susan’s A.I. in what men want and how to fulfill those desires. And those desires are presumed to almost always be violent in nature.
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Now Susan is described as a BDSM sex doll, but to be clear, what is happening on screen is not even remotely BDSM. This is just a man punching an android who very much looks and acts like a woman every time she presses his sexual buttons. Perhaps this is what the film is trying to say, but it doesn’t make that point very clearly in regard to navigating consent, desire, and shame. Rather, McCrae uses Susan as a metaphor for a shallow message that seems to see all men as violent abusers who need to hit a woman and watch them cry just to get hard.
This is the definition of a film that men will love and women will hate, to be reductively binaristic in my thinking. Black Eyed Susan is a film that dares to empower the one nice guy who is actually pretty abusive, but since he feels a drop of empathy, he’s absolved of his sins. It’s a story many people who have had abusive partners know all too well, which would be a fascinating place of analysis for this film. However, any such discussion is ignored for Derek’s own journey in trying to prove he isn’t a bad guy, as well as a bizarre third-act reveal.
To Maffei’s credit, he turns in a strong performance as Derek who both struggles and enjoys his new line of work. His work and chemistry with Thälker make the film’s more intense scenes electric and dangerous. If only the script had let Maffei really dig into Derek, a character who sparingly mentions bouts of alcohol-induced violence and is far from perfect.
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Thälker as Susan is an inspired choice as they modulate their voice to sound both human and robotic in the same breath. It’s a difficult line to walk, especially when it comes to more erotic line delivery, but they’re able to make Susan feel so deeply uncanny. Also, they are not the typical look for a sex doll. With short, dark hair along with body hair on Susan’s armpits and vagina, there were efforts here to move past the blow-up doll image and transcend typical ideas of femininity.
Black Eyed Susan is also gorgeously shot on Super 16, which adds a layer of grit and realism to McCrae’s lo-fi sci-fi vision of a future of life-like sex dolls who are supposedly meant to help reduce domestic violence. Cinematographer Anton Zin makes the film feel like a liminal nightmare, which is assisted by Fabio Frizzi’s ethereal score.
The story McCrae tells here is familiar, following in the footsteps of Alex Garland’s Ex Machina and Franklin Ritch’s The Artifice Girl, but adding to the conversation by more directly confronting gendered violence. It’s an interesting idea, but the execution feels like an excuse to make an audience watch a man punch and abuse a woman for 85 minutes under the guise of discussing toxic masculinity. It doesn’t necessarily feel transgressive; instead, it feels contrived in its approach to telling a potentially interesting and disturbing tale about desire. The cinematography is lush and the performances are strong, but the shallow attempt to address real-world issues holds Black-Eyed Susan back from having anything substantial to say.
Summary
The cinematography is lush and the performances are strong, but the shallow attempt to address real-world issues holds Black-Eyed Susan back from having anything substantial to say.
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