How many rapes has the average woman seen on screen in her life? It’s a grim mental exercise – because there is an abundance of gratuitous sexual violence in cinema. Even movies that aren’t about violence against women have a nasty habit of casually using sexual assault to titillate or as a lazy shortcut to provide a character with backstory or depth.
Women Talking is a film about rape. The movie, adapted by the Canadian director Sarah Polley from Miriam Toews’s 2018 novel, begins after a handful of rapists have been caught preying on the women and girls in their remote, patriarchal Mennonite community. The women had been assaulted night after night, after being drugged with a cow tranquiliser. When one perpetrator was caught creeping through a girl’s window, bovine spray in hand, he ratted out his accomplices and they were all sent to the city’s jail “for their safety”.
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