The Carpenter (1988)

Alice (Lynne Adams) has just been released from psychiatric care following a break-down that saw her doing stuff like cutting her husband Martin’s (Pierre Lenoir) suits to pieces with scissors. Though, given that he cheats on her, doesn’t trust or believe anything she says and is the quiet version of a total prick in any other regard, too, one can have some doubts about her mental illness being anything more than her unwillingness to conform.

Well, in the beginning of the film at least. Later on, we’ll find Alice having difficulty discerning between dreams and reality, and having quite a few hallucinations as well, so she’s clearly not the most stable woman you’ll find even if you’re not a prick. Of course, given that everyone she meets during the course of the film apart from her sister is some kind of weirdo or horrible person, her mental state seems to be the world’s least problem.

To make her return to so-called normality easier (or to get her out of the way) her husband has decided to buy a small town house (it’s pretty cheap, too, for good reasons), and leave her there alone for most days and many nights, while a bunch of cheap hired hands are still busy finishing renovations. Most of them are obviously goons, would-be rapists and general assholes, which could become something of a problem for Alice, if not for the titular Carpenter. Said Carpenter (Wings Hauser) only comes out at night, only ever renovates when nobody but Alice is around, carrying a creepy smile and many a protestant work ethics speech on his lips. And he’s really handy when the casual rapist or robber comes around, just as casually cutting off body parts with a smile. Something which Alice witnesses with a shrug, a nod, and a smile.

At first, the Carpenter is a pleasant influence on Alice’s life, fighting off low-lives and strengthening her confidence. And really, he’s rather dreamy, too, isn’t he? Of course, he’s also the kind of guy who doesn’t take kindly to anything or anyone going against his ideas about propriety and correct human behaviour, so he might very well be just another asshole guy in Alice’s life. Though perhaps not exactly a living one, as will turn out.

So yes, quite obviously, there’s really no way not to read David Wellington’s The Carpenter as anything but an unequivocally feminist movie about a woman bedraggled by all kinds of shitty men finding the inner strength to become her own person. At first, one might believe the Carpenter to be an expression of her inner strengths expressed in a pretty socially conservative way. Give Alice’s difficulty with understanding the difference between dreams and reality and the general surreal air of her surroundings, I wouldn’t have been terribly surprised if the film had gone the route of turning the rogue handyman in a pure hallucination, with Alice herself committing or just imagining all the very brutal acts of self-defence.

Instead, the film goes for something all-out supernatural, turning the Carpenter into murderous ghost (revenant) who is just another shitty man for Alice to get away from. Well, okay, she does commit one little murder herself, but what’s a girl to do?

All of this does sound like a somewhat strange yet generally serious film, but Wellington’s execution is just plain weird, with actors chewing the scenery in ways reaching from the amateurish to the consciously, somewhat cleverly, surreal, while Alice, played with a wonderful mixture of strangeness and bright-eyed acceptance of the most horrible happenings by Adams, sleepwalks through a world that feels like a caricature of our own where every interaction is overblown in some way. weird or consciously awkward. From time to time, carpentry tools are used as weapons; blood spatters; Wings Hauser’s face does…things.

And while I’m all for a good feminist fable with a bit of light mutilation, it’s really the continuous mood of the strange I find remarkable about the film, as if all of it could just be a hallucination or a dream, or the sort of Americana fantasy one gets after digesting bad apple pie. Even better that Wellington and the script by Doug Taylor never actually go the “it was all a dream” route.