Elle

It doesn't get much darker than Elle.

A great companion piece for The Lobster if you're craving an evening of total anarchy.

This January.

In the film, a highly functioning potentially psychotic successful businessperson conducts her affairs with extreme emotional detachment, unless her ex-husband's involved, she's trying to help her emotionally abused son (a bad relationship with another potential psycho), or hoping her mother won't marry a coddling gigolo.

Even as she's raped at home and then thoroughly humiliated at work, at her own company, which produces sexually explicit video games, she still generally proceeds as if nothing's wrong and manages to accomplish an extraordinarily diverse number of tasks, pure robotic efficiency, as if she's been there and done that for every possible scenario, stoic impeccability existentially exonerated.

Unfortunately, in her youth, she accompanied her father as he proceeded to murder most of their neighbours, the story becoming a nationwide sensation, her life quite strange at all times forever after.

That's not all, it's even more dysfunctional, the eclectic cast of diverse oddballs even congregated for Christmas dinner, a scene that could have transported Elle into unapproachable contemptuous infinities, had it been even more sinister, had it sought after true infamy.

Therein lies a play for someone else to write.

Adam Reed? Mitchell Hurwitz?

Sadomasochistically submerged in ineffable grotesque hypotheticals, Elle's bourgeois community still must interrelate, it can't help it if that was how it was written.

Like pure misogyny masquerading as a caring caricature of feminine strength, Elle is as undefinable as it is cold and direct, its unmuzzled licentious agency, its pristine putrefaction, calculated to deafeningly depreciate, in gross inherent disillusion.

Not to say that it isn't well done.

It's quite well done in fact.

A sensation.

Pathologically speaking.