Alice Lowe is a triple threat as the writer, director and star of her pitch-black comedy about a pregnant woman whose unborn child psychically spurs her on to murder.
If necessity is the mother of invention, it is also, in the case of Alice Lowe, the unlikely mother of a film about a mother-to-be who goes on a killing spree.
Lowe, you see, is an actress who was more than halfway through her pregnancy with her first child last year when she was suddenly taken – let's say possessed, because that word might be apropos later – with the fear that the birth of her child might mean a sort of death for her career. It's a not-uncommon anxiety among professional women, and one that is often especially pronounced among those such as Lowe – a 39-year-old British actor and sometime screenwriter making her directorial debut with Prevenge, at the Toronto International Film Festival – whose livelihood depends on staying culturally current.
So she hammered out a darkly comic horror script about a heavily pregnant woman who, on the orders of her unborn child, seeks revenge for the untimely death of her former lover. "It's like I'm the vehicle, and she's driving," Lowe's antihero, Ruth, tells her unsuspecting midwife, who thinks she's speaking about pregnancy in general. "Honestly, it's like a hostile takeover."
"I kind of thought, 'How do I turn this to my benefit, this scenario?'" Lowe said the other day, in the café of the downtown Hilton Hotel, dressed in a cute black dress with a prim high collar, thankfully looking nothing like the murderous Ruth. Across the lobby, Lowe's adorable eight-month-old daughter, Della Moon Synnott, who has a cameo in Prevenge, was being kept occupied by a friend.
"It was never my intention to make loads of films about killing people," she explained, referring to the fact that her first screenplay, Sightseers (2012), was a dark satire about a new couple who go on a road trip that leaves a trail of dead bodies in their wake. With Prevenge, "It was just more that I had to make a film about a pregnant woman," and it was more interesting to create "the antithesis of that image … you know, someone who ought to be thinking about the future but is thinking about the past, and revenge."
Lowe's film arrives while the industry is in contortions over its stark gender imbalance – both in front of and, especially, behind the camera. Only two of the films in competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival were directed by women. As TIFF got under way, Telefilm Canada declared it would make (unspecific) moves to increase the number of women filmmakers it funds.
"You can do Women in Film panels, going, 'Oh, isn't it awful?' And actually, I just think [it's about] turning a lot of these things to your benefit. Like, I knew a man can't make this film. He can make a film about a pregnant revenge killer, of course, but he wouldn't be able to do it like me. No one's going to step in at the last minute and go, 'We're going to get him to direct this.'"
The film was inspired in part by Lowe's experiences suddenly thrust into what felt like very foreign territory. At a mothers-to-be class, when she expressed anxiety over her imminent loss of income and other disruptions to her career, "All these women were like, 'No, you're not supposed to say anything like that,' and it comes to their turn and they said, like, 'I'm really looking forward to getting on with the shopping, and painting the nursery.' Oh, my God."
Lowe paused, gave a little laugh, and relented a bit. "I know there's a good side to trying to relax. But for me, my personality, it didn't relax me at all. I just felt like, I'm not meeting expectations," she added. "So I kind of felt there was room to express that in a way that women would identify with. So the film, for me, it was really cathartic, because then I just felt like I had a great pregnancy."
Prevenge has fun with the modern state of pregnancy and motherhood, soaking the bloody proceedings in cold-blooded, offhand comedy. "Children these days are really spoiled," Ruth notes with wry understatement. "'Mummy, I want a Playstation. Mummy, I want you to kill that man.'"
Still, while the film has its modern touchstones, Lowe noted its ancient antecedents.
"I was influenced by classical plays and classical ideas – characters such as Clytemnestra and Electra and Medea, all of those things I studied at university. You want a narrative that's timeless," she said.
"There are goddesses of revenge, the Furies, so I kind of had this idea that she's not human any more, she's become like an embodiment, an elemental force. It's almost like she's a superhero, but her special powers are her pregnancy. So whatever we traditionally think of as fragility or weakness in pregnant women, particularly, I was trying to change that into a strength. The fact that people think she's weak enables her to kill them."
As the conversation wound down, it took a turn from the murderous to the maternal. Lowe said that, with one film under her directorial belt, she now has the confidence to ask for more family-friendly conditions on her next. "It's going to enhance the project if I'm happy about what my child-care situation is," she explained.
"I think parents in the industry, we all need to be demanding more, in terms of protecting our family lives and our social lives, because it's a very demanding industry. People get divorced, and people don't see their kids enough, because they're working ridiculous hours, for example."
Lowe mentions the singer Amanda Palmer, who was criticized by a fan for taking crowdfunding to make music and instead had a baby. "Her conclusion was, artists have to have a life, because your art comes from your life, so this baby might be what I need to do next for my art to grow and develop.
"There's too much of a sense that having kids is separate from life. That you take time out from humanity to be a parent and then you re-enter society," Lowe said.
"I felt like, if I do this, it's going to become part of the fabric of my work, and that has to be allowed, and that has to be a good thing, rather than 'the death of art is the pram in the hall,'" she added, referring to an aphorism by writer Cyril Connolly. "Maybe the pram in the hall is art?"
Lowe's friend began pushing Della in a high chair toward the table, and Lowe leaped up with a smile to greet her daughter. She turned back for a second: "Quote me on that!"
Prevenge screens Saturday at 6:15 p.m. at Scotiabank Theatre (tiff.net).
Simon Houpt