Search Film, Company, People...

THE YELLOW WALLPAPER

By Kevin PONTUTI

Thriller - Completed 2021

A dark and disturbing modern adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s well-known gothic feminist horror story about patriarchy and mental health.

- Year of production
- 2021
- Genres
- Thriller
- Countries
- IRELAND, USA
- Duration
- 99 mn
- Director(s)
- Kevin PONTUTI
- Synopsis
- The Yellow Wallpaper opens with the story’s unnamed narrator, who expresses her thoughts in the form of journal entries. She feels, however, that there is “something queer” about the place and explains that her case of “nervous depression” is what prompted their stay. The narrator complains that her husband John, who is also her doctor, belittles both her illness and, more generally, her perspective. Her treatment, known as the “rest cure,” requires that she refrain from virtually any form of activity, even working and writing. Despite these instructions, she feels that activity, freedom, and interesting work would help her condition and has begun keeping a secret journal in order. In the nursery now bedroom on the top floor, however, she finds the yellow wallpaper, with its strange, formless pattern, to be particularly disturbing.
  As the first few weeks of the summer pass, the narrator succeeds at hiding her journal from John and complains about his patronizing, controlling ways, she takes a new interest in the oddly-menacing wallpaper. John worries about her fixation, and he refuses to repaper the room so as not to give in to her nervousness.
  As the summer passes, John threatens to send her to Weir Mitchell, the real-life physician under whose care author Charlotte Perkins Gilman suffered. As her obsession grows, behind the main pattern the wallpaper, begins to resemble a woman “stooping down and creeping” which at nighttime looks like the bars of a cage. Soon the wallpaper dominates the narrator’s imagination. Mistaking the narrator’s fixation for tranquility, John thinks she is improving. On the contrary, she sleeps less and less and believes that she can smell the paper all over the house. The sub-pattern now clearly resembles a woman who is trying to escape from behind the main pattern.
  Suspecting that John and Jennie know of her obsession, she resolves to destroy the paper once and for all, peeling much of it off during the night. While left alone the next day, she goes into something of a frenzy, tearing at the paper in order to free the trapped woman whom she sees struggling from inside the pattern. By the end, the narrator is hopelessly insane, convinced that there are many women creeping around and that she herself has come out of the wallpaper. She creeps endlessly around the room, smudging the wallpaper as she goes. When John breaks into the locked room and sees the full horror of the situation, he faints in the doorway so that the narrator has “to creep over him every time!”