I'm Your Woman

Writer/director Julia Hart's intimate thriller flips the familiar crime narrative on its head by exploring the aftershocks of male violence from a female perspective. Trophy wife Jean (The Marvelous Mrs Maisel's Rachel Brosnahan) doesn't know what to do when her gangster husband (Bill Heck) returns home one day and hands her a baby. She's even more confused when, not long afterwards, one of his cronies tells her to take the child and flee with the mysterious Cal (Arinzé Kene). What follows is a film thick with tension, and one that cleverly makes us wonder if the threat of encroaching danger is merely the paranoia of an exhausted parent. "I swear I hear him crying when he's asleep," Jean confesses of the baby. It's a shame, then, that the film's second half takes such a conventional turn as, stuck at Cal's cabin, Jean and Cal's wife (Marsha Stephanie Blake) decide to take matters into their own hands. It's all very well executed by Hart, and Brosnahan is riveting, but I'm Your Woman isn't quite so fresh when it faces the genre clichés head on.