Bonus Watching: Tell It To The Bees (2018) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (2019)

List Progress 8/12 (+2)

I was visiting my fiancee for a week and got to watch some movies, but none of them fit my list. But have some mini-reviews anyway!

Tell It To The Bees (2018) is a very sweet lesbian period piece set in 1950’s Scotland. A recently-single mother and her son develop a friendship with the shy female doctor next door and must deal with the fall-out from a close-minded community. This movie does not softball the realities of being a queer woman in this setting, and the bittersweet tone by the end is frustrating through justified. The two leads do have a great deal of chemistry, and I absolutely cared about them being happy together, which is the mark of a good romance in my mind.

Would I Recommend It: Yes. (But trigger warnings for rape, homophobia, and medical violence.)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (2019) is a recent adaptation of the 1962 Shirley Jackson novel of the same name. I am biased by the fact that I greatly enjoyed the book and reread it earlier this year, but I have never seen an adaptation miss the point of a story so hard. But I think that even newcomers would be turned off by this flat, atmosphere-less film that throws sexualized violence at women when it can’t think of other ways to be frightening. The actors are trying their hardest and doing well with what they’re given, so I lay this firmly on director Stacie Patton and writer Mark Kruger. Narrator and feral young woman Merricat Blackwood is one of the great characters of horror literature, and I don’t think anyone involved in the making of this movie understood her at all.

Would I Recommend It: Readthebookreadthebookreadthebook