‘Malcolm & Marie’ is a Slasher Film
The knives may be emotional, but they inflict violence and wound.
SPOILERS FOLLOW. Netflix’s Malcolm & Marie is not a romantic drama. It is a distillation of a toxic, abusive relationship that fails to face its central premise head on. Malcolm & Marie is about emotional violence and the elisions and manipulation that cover it up. The film was marketed very differently, and I think the bait and switch backfired. Audiences went in expecting a movie about a couple quarreling, perhaps even viciously at times, but the trailers gave the impression that we’d see something of a loving relationship between the charming, beautiful couple played by Zendaya and John David Washington, not an unrelenting cascade of escalating emotional abuse tactics.
The choice of marketing campaign is so baffling, because the opening shot of Malcolm & Marie tells the audience clearly the nature of the film they are about to watch. It is the exterior of an isolated, glass-walled modernist house. It is night. Everything is in shadow. It feels sinister — film noirish. When the film opened, I recalled a line from Susanna Clarke’s novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel, where she describes a mansion as the kind of house a lady would be persecuted in. The reference, I soon discovered, was apt. The beautiful, immaculately decorated setting of Malcolm &…
