Sightlines · a viewing thread

The World Against Her

A run of women worn down or driven to extremity by a merciless community, marriage, or economy — watch them near each other and the sacrifice, the drift, and the violence start to rhyme.

Arthouse and film-school canon, mostly demanding and several genuinely devastating — the kind you watch when you want to be moved hard, with Monster and Ida the more accessible ways in.

  • Dogville (2003)
  • Breaking the Waves (1996)
  • Wanda (1970)
  • Monster (2003)
  • Red Desert (1964)
  • Ida (2013)
  • Dancer in the Dark (2000) — The von Trier musical you flinched from finishing — the overlooked companion to Dogville and Breaking the Waves, another blind, self-sacrificing woman ground up whole by a system that never repays her.
  • Vagabond (1985) — Varda's frozen drifter reconstructed backward from a ditch — if Wanda's aimless, downward drift stayed with you, this is the under-seen one to finally pull down.
  • Rosetta (1999) — The Dardennes' teenage girl clawing for a single job while propping up an alcoholic mother — the relentless economic-siege film to recollect if Wanda's poverty and desperation cut deep.
  • Vera Drake (2004) — The cheerful London cleaner quietly performing abortions until the law and neighbors turn on her — the devastating community-scapegoat film that sits right beside Ida and Dogville.
  • The Girl with the Needle (2024) — A jobless, pregnant factory worker with no safety net in post-war Copenhagen — the recent under-seen one that carries the cruelty of Breaking the Waves and Ida forward.
  • Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976) — Three days of a Brussels widow's clockwork housework tightening silently toward violence — the demanding formal cousin of Red Desert if you want a woman's extremity rendered in stillness.
  • Tess (1979) — Hardy's poor country girl crushed between class and the men who claim and discard her — the overlooked period tragedy in the lineage of Dogville's and Breaking the Waves' scapegoated women.
  • Beyond the Hills (2012) — A woman broken by a convent's merciless faith when she returns to reclaim the one person she loves — the under-seen Romanian companion to Ida.
  • The Piano (1993) — The mute bride shipped into an arranged colonial marriage and mutilated for defying it — the overlooked marriage-as-cage film that rhymes with Breaking the Waves and Red Desert.