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Berta (2024)
Directed & Written by Lucía Forner Segarra
Starring Nerea Barros & Elías González

Thriller

★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

Lucía Forner Segarra’s Berta begins with the eponymous Berta (Nerea Barros) seemingly doing a regular job working for a tow truck company. She’s towing a vehicle while a man condescends to her, calling her “doll” and questioning why she might be watching a YouTube tutorial on how to tow a truck. Quickly the situation changes and Berta has the man in a very vulnerable situation. She explains to him plainly: “You raped me.” And while the man adamantly denies he did anything to Berta, she insists on the truth, even if that means eviscerating the past and his manhood to bring it out.

The special part about Berta, which at first feels like it’s going the route of typical rape-revenge horror-thrillers, is that Segarra takes a more unexpected route to envision revenge less as eye-for-an-eye violence, more like therapeutic theatre. Segarra’s story prioritises understanding of the trauma inflicted upon Berta (albeit slightly violent understanding in the end) over gruesome revenge. Berta certainly doesn’t let her rapist get away without leaving a very literal, physical mark upon his body; however, she doesn’t go as far as her experiment in Grand Guignol theatre first leads us to believe she’ll go. She tells the monster in front of her that she will “create a trauma for you to make us even,” yet only scares him to the point he understands her terror when he originally assaulted her.

Berta makes an important point when she tells him: “Cutting your dick off is not the solution. You still rape us with objects.” Before she leaves the rapist, she urges him to raise his son right, too. Although she does leave him with future scars, she doesn’t choose any real violence similar to the violence done to her because violence only begets more violence, and that is no way to fix the world. Berta’s insistence that her rapist raise his son correctly is where real change lies. Women like Berta are busy in therapy trying to fix the damage done by all the sons let loose into the world to do untold horrors, but what needs to be fixed about the world is not the women, it’s the men.

Dirty Bad Wrong (2024)
Directed & Written by Erica Orofino
Starring Michaela Kurimsky, Cody Ray Thompson, & Jack Greig.

Drama

★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

In Erica Orofino’s dark drama Dirty Bad Wrong, a young woman named Sid (Michaela Kurimsky) does sex work to provide for herself and her little boy Jesse (Jack Greig), but comes to a scary turning point when she wants to give him an expensive superhero birthday party that requires doing something she normally would never do. Early on, we see Sid with a guy called John (Cody Ray Thompson), who offers her a fat envelope filled with cash. She replies: “I‘m not doing that.” As the short wears on, Sid’s will to give her boy a wonderful birthday brings her back to that envelope once she leaves her purse on a subway train, and she decides she has no other options except to give into John’s twisted requests.

Dirty Bad Wrong is about the brutal, selfless sacrifice of a mother for her child, which, while focused on sex work here, is a universal theme in the lives of so many working-class and low-income women. How many single mothers have had to sacrifice their minds and bodies to jobs that suck the life out of them? Obviously sex work and its potential disturbing iterations are the centrepiece in Orofino’s short, though. After Sid decides she’s going to do the unsettling things that John wants to pay her big money for, her previous scars are made visible before he begins to work on making new ones. The previous scars show us the nasty reality of Sid’s life, and we understanding this is not the first time she’s had to resort to such horror in order to provide for her son, or even just for herself. After we see Sid’s personal body horror, we see the results when Jesse gets his superhero party. A sweet moment occurs after Jesse gets a brief glimpse of his mother’s scars and he comes to her, kissing her hand, totally unaware of the lengths mom has gone to make him happy. The final shot lingers on the traumatised mother and though she has tears in her eyes, she smiles through them out of pure love for her child. It’s a bittersweet ending that reminds us of how, unfortunately, sometimes the line between love and pain is nonexistent.

Hell is a Teenage Girl (2024)
Directed & Written by Stephen Sawchuk
Starring Skylar Radzion, Faly Mevamanana, & Mar Andersons.

Horror

★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

Hell is a Teenage Girl takes us back to the 1980s Reagan-era slasher rules of the sub-genre’s Golden Age, as high school student Parker (Skylar Radzion) deals with people in her town believing she’s “the spawn of Satan” because of her father, a vicious murderer dubbed the Springboro Slasher (no doubt a nod to Wes Craven’s Scream and Woodsboro), who returns every Halloween to make sure all the teens are adhering to the rules: “Don‘t drink, don‘t do drugs, and don‘t have sex.” If they don’t follow the rules, they die. This year, Parker’s finally decided she’s had enough of being a scapegoat for how people feel about her slasher dad, and she’s had about enough of ol’ dad, too.

There’s lots of good stuff in Hell is a Teenage Girl about slasher tropes and Parker going against the rules to draw out her father is fun. At the same time, Parker’s situation looks at the sad reality of how women so often become scapegoats for the actions of men. After her friend suggests she’s going to be a big hero in their town, she all but laughs and replies: “For 16 years, everyone in this town made my life a living hell for things I didn‘t even do. What makes you think they‘re gonna suddenly praise me for something that I did do?” Women of all ages have taken the brunt of abuse when it comes to the actions committed by their husbands and their fathers throughout history. And that’s why, in the end, Parker’s decision to take up her father’s mask and knife to take revenge on her town is a great one to close out the short because she decides to lean into all the scapegoating. Hell is a Teenage Girl is a smart, nasty look at how women are damned if they do, damned if they don’t, so they may as well do whatever they please.