Amber Walker

Jessica Hausner is an acquired taste. Her films are often dry and deliberately stagnant, forcing the audience to lean in and pay attention because the emotional core is often elusive, hiding in the dark, attainable if you’re willing to let it consume you.

The legacy of witches is an inherently gendered one. It cannot be separated from its stereotypes and from the inherent fear of aberrational women. By extension, witches are often described as failed, wayward women, transgressing the bounds of patriarchy, intentionally flouting the rules of womanhood or worse, having their womanhood stripped from them by way of caricatures. They are grotesque. They are a danger to your children. They will harm you if you venture too deep into the woods.

I live in the UK, which, in recent years, has not-so-lovingly been nicknamed 'TERF Island'. This is due to the rampant transphobia seemingly going unquestioned in feminist spaces for decades, finally rearing its disgusting head at full force, due to its endorsement by popular figures like J.K. Rowling and Graham Linehan. It's a movement that asks women to see their gender as a source of perpetual pain and trauma, eventually manifesting in transphobia.