Freak Weather

Freak Weather poses the question of how far a woman is an accessory to her own mistreatment. The film starts when Penny (Jacqueline McKenzie) is booted out of the house by her boyfriend. It will be the day she takes action against the man who abuses her, but she doesn’t know that yet. She thinks she will please him by making the house warm and sociable, looking after the children, doing his jobs, getting rid of the dog. But on this day she gets everything wrong. For Penny things apparently have to get worse before they can get better. Freak Weather is an apparently minor story, but Penny’s attempts to deny her pain and fear are grand. Her solution in the end is: don’t feel any more. If she finally stops feeling anything, then the fear stops too. She tries to have the dog put down at the hospital, the first idea that comes into her head. She has more grotesque ideas and is surprised when someone points out to her that there are also other ways. Her son is precocious in many ways and is the only one to keep her away from the brink of disaster, even if she does blame him for everything that goes wrong. In Freak Weather, a film that is sometimes filled with surrealist poetry, Kuryla sketches a character who seems in many ways to suffer from a borderline disorder and is almost intolerable, but also intriguing in the way she seeks freedom in her despair.