A viewing of Black Eyed Susan (2024) will, if you have any stomach to get through its blisteringly unpleasant quandaries and implications, leave you with many questions. However, for all of that, the one resounding question for this reviewer is: are we ten years away from this kind of scenario, or five?
Let me explain. Whilst it’s impossible to really call the film subtle, it comes from that popular, new style of science fiction and/or dystopia which eschews flashy SFX in order to ponder the philosophical ramifications of its world-building. Black Eyed Susan emphatically won’t be for everyone: some viewers will be blinded by the basic plotline, or repelled by the language used, or just unable to see past the most obvious and unpleasant aspects, which are there from the outset. But unpleasant or otherwise, this is a hell of a film: unseemly and uncanny, yet familiar and just realistic enough to get under one’s skin. It dares to question where modern moral lines are drawn, whilst providing a perhaps surprisingly intimate character study of a regular man – even an Everyman? – who finds himself in an unprecedented situation, with his own moral lines to ponder.
The film opens in medias res, midway through a conversation between a man, Alan (Scott Fowler) and a young, as-yet unnamed woman. She seems unusually fearless, even though Alan is clearly agitated; she even starts to goad him, belittling his brittle masculinity until he starts to physically assault her. Every blow he lands, she deems pathetic. As this scenario unfolds, he becomes increasingly aroused by the abuse he’s inflicting on her, but things shift when it becomes apparent that someone else is watching them. Voyeurism in this film is multi-layered, and always repackaged as having some neutral, exploratory purpose. So we’re watching them, also being watched by as-yet unseen and unknown others.
If, from the opening seconds, this situation feels unsavoury, as if we are spying on abuse, it becomes differently unsavoury when it’s revealed that this is in fact a kind of training session. The young woman isn’t a woman – she’s a state-of-the-art sex doll, designed for men who like a dash of domestic abuse with their sex lives. Alan is a tester, working on behalf of tech start-up guru Gil (Marc Romeo). Whatever he does to the doll, helps it to learn – which makes it not just okay, but important work. Gil, who has made an artform out of his detachment from any potential ethical concerns involved with this work, comes to speak to Alan and invites him to admire the realistic bruising – although getting a black eye ‘right’ is something they’re still working on. But he feels they might get better results if Alan agrees to test the doll in a non-lab environment: perhaps he’d like to borrow Gil’s second home in upstate New York?
Three months later, there’s been a death. Alan is no more. What can have happened in the interim? We aren’t explicitly told, but at the memorial, Gil runs into an old mutual friend, Derek (Damian Maffei). They discuss Alan, but talk soon turns to the gritty realities of modern life: money, work, prospects. Derek is down on his luck at present, so it’s roundly unsurprising that Gil asks if he’d consider taking Alan’s place as a tester/trainer. He sells it to him not just by proudly talking him through his doll’s ultra-real physical traits, but by making claims that these dolls will function as pressure valves for stressed men. In effect, these dolls are deemed necessary: Derek will be helping to perfect the technology by training the device, mordantly nicknamed Black Eyed Susan by the team.
It’s not immediately clear whether or not Derek accepts Gil’s claims about the doll’s purpose, and when he gets started, he struggles with the idea of striking the doll, but he gets through the first session. He also agrees to go forward with the role, as much as he’s uncomfortable that everything he does with (and to) Susan is being recorded – by Gil, and by the film’s only other – sorry, only tangible female character, the unseen team member, Amanda, who can see what he does through Susan’s own eyes. It’s decided pretty early on that the project might benefit from some field testing. Perhaps Alan would like to borrow Gil’s second home in upstate New York?
We’ve heard this before, so at this point the audience diverges from Derek, who agrees to take Susan to the house. As he spends time with her, she starts to mirror his expectations and desires: he shows little inclination for abuse, and as such, she begins to behave like a loving, sympathetic woman who doesn’t want to be beaten. Susan has capacities which even Gil and Amanda never realised, but this is nonetheless a complicated situation where, over time, Derek’s own emotional connections begin to act as a complicating factor. Just as Susan is being trained by what she is asked, so is Derek: Susan is teaching him. It’s the extent of these lessons, based on their interactions, which ultimately grants the film its darkest aspects.
The murk and bile seeping from this film’s earliest scenes are hideous, true, but the meticulous, bold, careful construction behind the murk displays incredible prowess. There’s an art to generating discomfort, and whilst people may opt out, dismissing all of this as deliberately vile and nothing more, there’s so much more going on here. Forget about its violence for a moment (which, by the by, only turns into ultraviolence in a handful of seconds). Its use of language, for example, where wearisome, pornographic epithets like ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ clash with occupational lexis from the world of business, with words like ‘intermediary’, ‘the device’, ‘the mechanism’ and the disconcerting ‘arousal history’. Susan isn’t just talked about, she’s written on, with ideas about how to modify her appearance actually scrawled onto her skin. This is modern life, folks – dysphemism, euphemism, problems with talking clearly and openly. Derek tries to get to that point, but he is hamstrung by the fact that his selected confidant is a ‘device’ programmed to be a ‘slut’. He’s clearly lonely, and what he really wants – there’s that Everyman thing again – is love, companionship. His material and emotional hardship is exploited by Gil, but that’s not the only exploitation Gil has in mind, as the film gets steadily more and more challenging.
And, as Derek’s story progresses, we’re invited to consider the same things he’s made to consider. Where do our morals come from, and are they immoveable? The film itself – director and writer Scooter McCrae has opted for Super 16mm – is ideal for this kind of soul-searching. The film’s deep darks and heavy grain, which edge into chiaroscuro in places, are perfect for this demi-monde and its struggling, unshaved, rootless men. If the film appears to warm up as it goes, with more of a conventional, conventionally-lit domestic setting, then it’s worth contrasting this with Yvonne Emilie Thälker’s pitch-perfect performance as Susan. She successfully enacts the aspects of fantasy associated with Susan, but seems to have a mysterious, chilly inner life somehow. It’s intriguing. The camera has her naked body in shot for a great deal of the time here, which must have made for a challenging experience as a first-time actor, but nonetheless, she always seems to be in control somehow. We need to remember that we are looking at a ‘device’ which is also a conduit for the observations of an unseen woman, Amanda. That’s a big ask for an actor, but Thälker does it. It’s helpful that she has such a good script to work with, one which skirts just the right, uncomfortable amount around conversational norms. It seems at times like Susan has ‘learned’ to be empathic, but then she, or it, shows that this isn’t the case. Some of her lines are even kinda funny. Then there’s the wraparound soundtrack by none other than Fabio Frizzi, whose work always lends a strange ambience to the films in question.
Black Eyed Susan may be discomfiting, but my god, it’s worthwhile. Ten years away? Five years away? Ethically impossible? Ultimately, whether near or far, it confronts the viewer with a rich and unsettling array of questions which burn themselves into your psyche. It’s not easily forgotten, and deserves the queasy, rapt attention which it must surely generate.
Black Eyed Susan received its World Premiere as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.