Cuddly Toys (2021)

A searing and unforgettable indictment of how far we have not come in our male-dominated society for creating a safe space for young women.

Oftentimes at the mercy of a patriarchal society that transacts in their exploitation, young women are expected to navigate systems and institutions that routinely minimize their fears, dismiss their experiences, and normalize their abuse.

Writer and director Kansas Bowling, with a cast of 100 actresses, tackles customs and conventions that have systematically oppressed young women -- castigating those conventions with shocking recreations of molestation, sexual assault, gaslighting, and psychological abuse that left me shaken long after the film ended.

Using an early 1970s public school educational aesthetic, Bowling (as a satirical version of herself, "Professor Kansas Bowling") guides viewers through the murky and morally grey world that young women of America are thrust into.

Combined with a whimsical late-1960s and early-1970s soundtrack that recalls educational shorts and classroom film strips of the period, the effect is profoundly disarming; the nostalgic presentation only sharpens the horror of what follows.

Shot on Super 16mm — a decision that plays very well with the film's 1970s educational convention — the film unfolds as a series of vignettes -- some filmed in New York City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Annapolis, Philadelphia, Joshua Tree, and even La Isla de las Muñecas through the canals of Xochimilco near Mexico City -- each explores another facet of a culture that too often dismisses, minimizes, excuses, or outright enables abuse.

The cumulative effect is exhausting by design. Bowling isn't interested in offering audiences the comfort of believing these are isolated incidents or aberrant behavior. The point is the pattern. The repetition. The normalization.

By the time the credits roll, Cuddly Toys has transformed from satire into something approaching a warning label for modern womanhood.

Then comes one final gut punch:

"There are 100 actresses in this film. Statistically, two will die before they turn 30. Who will they be?"

It is an impossibly cruel question made all the more horrifying by the fact that it isn't hyperbole but a statistical reality. Long after the grainy images of Bowling's fever dream have faded from memory, that question remains -- hanging over the film, and over society itself, demanding an answer nobody wants to give.