Catch the Fair One (2022)
Directed by Josef Kubota Wladyka
A Native American boxer embarks on the fight of her life when she goes in search of her missing sister.
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3 films that influenced Catch the Fair One
What critics say influenced Catch the Fair One
This is a thriller in the “Taken” vein, although more rooted in a personal experience than mindless action.
It doesn't evince the same level of unruly auteurism as, say, Lynne Ramsay’s masterful You Were Never Really Here (2017), but it’s closer to that film than it is to Taken (2008).
In many ways, she is like the female equivalent of Liam Neeson in the film Taken , in terms of how Wladyka portrays Kaylee’s power and confidence.
This is not the cartoon, meme-worthy world of Liam Neeson in Taken .
Executive produced by Darren Aronofsky (and produced by Nomadland Oscar winner Mollye Asher), it’s a lean, efficient variation on Taken in which women are both predator and prey, and happily-ever-afters are best left to the imagination.
This minimalistic character study contains a violent ferocity that’s not for the weak of heart, and the catharsis of a trafficking film like “Taken,” where a former CIA assassin (Liam Neeson) goes to rescue his daughter from Albanian traffickers with immensely satisfying revenge payoffs, is nowhere to be found here.
The 2017 crime thriller “Wind River” touched on this problem of U.S. law enforcement often sidelining Native American female crime victims, compared to white females who are victims of the same crimes.
The similarly themed and far more high profile film, Wind River starring Jeremy Renner was an introduction to this idea.
What’s more, centering the story on a Native hero banishes the White-savior staleness and attendant sensation of misery tourism that afflicted Wind River (2017), another feature that ostensibly tackled the subject of MMIWG.
That may be harsh, but unlike with Wind River director Wladyka never shifts Catch the Fair One ’s narrative focus (and as a result, audience sympathies) to anyone other than the Indigenous women in question.
Likewise, Catch the Fair One might induce memories of another Sheridan project, that being the script he wrote for Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario – as both films share a penchant for cold displays of torture, graphic violence, and an ominously droning score ( Catch the Fair One ’s Nathan Halpern is really channeling the late Jóhann Jóhannsson here) – but at least Wladyka’s film is less politically ambivalent.