What if you were the last woman on Earth? That’s certainly been a theme as of late with movies coming out of film festivals this year. In Z for Zachariah, Margot Robbie is the designated last woman standing after a nuclear holocaust, and in The Keeping Room we have three women, Augusta (Brit Marling), Louise (Hailee Steinfeld), and their slave girl Mad (Muna Otaru), who are all wondering if they are the last women alive after the American Civil War.
The three ladies spend their days working on the farm, mostly in brooding silence. Except one day that silence is turned sour when the younger sister Louise finds herself hurt. Falling ill, Augusta goes to town to find medicine for her sister, but instead she only finds death, decay, and two Union soldiers who have been ransacking the countryside, raping and killing women. Augusta manages to escape the men, but winds up leading them to her home, where her sister lay sick.
The Keeping Room is a twist on the western; a period-piece home invasion film that’s littered with historical relevance. The film takes place during Sherman’s March, also known as the “March of the Sea,” where 60,000 soldiers walked a 285-mile stretch from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia where they stole food, livestock, and burned down the homes of the civilians who fought back. Daniel Barber’s film is told from the perspective of the women who were left at home during the war, and in this case the kinds of women who fought back.
And in The Keeping Room do they ever fight back. Julia Hart writes incredibly powerful females who have the world taken from them, but they still carry on. Augusta’s lost her home, Louise loses her virtue, and Mad loses the man she loves. Yet these women throughout the night never stop giving it their all. There’s a powerful message here for women, that even when the horizon is ablaze there’s still time to move on, still a new place to go.
What really works here is that Hart’s screenplay slowly burns until the aforementioned home invasion. Sometimes this hinders the pacing of the film, but overall it works to its benefit. You start to feel these ladies’ routine. Augusta plays the leader, always looking out for Louise even though her stubborn racism sometimes becomes overbearing. Mad is less tolerant, but she still innately cares about Louise, so she does her best to ignore the girl’s silent tantrums when she dines with her.
The two men, played by Sam Worthington and Kyle Soller, don’t really have any depth to them. They’re just butchers roaming from one place to the next, raping and pillaging their way through the South. There’s some interesting subtext to that; but it also fits in line with your typical horror film terrorist: the monster is invading the home just because, and no other reason but. The only difference here is that they’re monsters dressed up in Union soldiers’ clothing.
Women rarely have a place in westerns. The iconic genre is a man’s genre, but Hart, Barber, and the film’s three leading ladies prove that it’s not just that. We want to see more films like Z for Zachariah and The Keeping Room; films about strong women who fight men and the end of the world (whether that world is dystopia or the tail end of a major war is just a minor detail). The Keeping Room doesn’t lose itself in rape-revenge, but rather rejuvenates the genre and creates a distinct tale about survival. When the bullish patriarchy comes along and the subjected are discriminated and attacked, they will stand tall and keep on fighting.
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