JP Nunez
Black Eyed Susan has been on my radar for a little while now. I first heard about this film when it debuted at Fantasia a few months ago, and it immediately caught my eye. It was billed as a hard-hitting takedown of male sexual abuse and exploitation of women, and if you’re familiar with my work, you might know that I’m very passionate about this issue. I knew I had to check this movie out at some point, so when I was offered a screener for its New York premiere at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, I jumped at the opportunity.
Black Eyed Susan was written and directed by Scooter McCrae, and it stars Damian Maffei, Yvonne Emilie Thälker, and Marc Romeo. In the film, Derek is down on his luck. He’s separated from his wife, out of a job, and rummaging through garbage cans for food, so he’s in a pretty bad spot. To make matters worse, his old friend Alan unexpectedly kills himself, so nothing seems to be going right for the poor guy. But that all changes when he runs into another old buddy, Gil, at Alan’s funeral.
Gil is a tech industrialist who’s created the titular Susan, a hyper-realistic sex robot programmed to enjoy physical abuse, and Alan was testing it out for him. But with Alan’s tragic passing, Gil needs someone to fill this suddenly vacant position, and he offers the job to Derek. Despite some initial hesitancy, Derek eventually accepts the offer, and as he spends more time with Susan, he starts to develop genuine feelings for the android.
From that plot synopsis, you might think Black Eyed Susan is very similar to the 2014 sci-fi gem Ex Machina, and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. These movies share some very clear structural similarities, but once you get beyond the basic idea of a tech big-shot asking someone to test out an advanced female-looking robot, they’re actually very different.
Let’s start with the androids. Ava from Ex Machina acts like a real human being (albeit a naive one, at least at first), but Susan is much more robotic. She speaks with the flat, seemingly disinterested tone we typically associate with artificial intelligence, and when she’s not being used, she just sits perfectly still, staring out into space like she’s waiting for her next command. It’s a seemingly simple role that requires a tremendous amount of concentration and focus, and actor Yvonne Emilie Thälker pulls it off without breaking a sweat.
What’s more, Ex Machina is a thrilling story that will keep you guessing the whole way through, but Black Eyed Susan is much more straightforward. It’s about a guy testing out a sex robot, and…well, that’s basically it. Granted, the film does throw us a curveball or two in the final 10 minutes or so, but by and large, this narrative isn’t particularly compelling. It’s little more than an excuse to bring the themes of sexual abuse and exploitation to life, so Black Eyed Susan stands or falls almost entirely on its presentation of those ideas.
And for my money, it’s a very mixed bag at best. Let’s start with the good. This movie uses its AI storyline to highlight the disturbing predilection for violent sex that seems to be on the rise among men today, and it forces us to reflect on this unsavory reality. In particular, it asks if it’s ever good to indulge these dark desires, even in seemingly innocuous ways, and while the answer is a bit subtle, I’m sure it’s going to make a lot of men very uncomfortable.
Unfortunately, I can’t get into specifics without ruining the ending, but I can say that this story creates a clear parallel between Derek’s use of Susan and something we’d all agree is morally reprehensible. It makes it very difficult to condone the use of this seemingly harmless sex doll, and that has big implications for something a lot of men in our society take for granted: pornography.
Modern internet porn is saturated with the kind of verbal and physical abuse Black Eyed Susan rails against, so even though I can’t be sure, it almost seems like Susan is just a thinly veiled allegory for pornography. But even if it’s not, the parallel is impossible to miss, so you’d be hard-pressed to walk away from this film without at least wondering about the dark side of violent porn.
That being said, I have a big problem with the way those great ideas play out on screen. For the vast majority of this film’s runtime, Susan is either naked or wearing see-through clothes that might as well not even be there, so you see numerous shots of Yvonne Emilie Thälker’s breasts and genitals. There’s also a boatload of sexual content that’s only a camera angle away from a Ron Jeremy flick, and that combination makes it feel like you’re just watching an 85-minute porno.
To be fair, I understand what writer/director Scooter McCrae is going for. He’s trying to forcefully confront viewers with the dark reality of exploitation and abuse, and I commend him for that. But he goes way, way too far. Some nudity and sexual content here and there could’ve felt like a natural part of the story, but we don’t need to see anywhere near this much.
It overwhelms everything else about the movie and practically invites the kind of objectifying male gaze that feeds into the problems McCrae is so concerned with. It turns Black Eyed Susan into an exercise in gratuitous exploitation first and a hard-hitting social commentary second, and that completely ruins the experience.
Black Eyed Susan played at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival on October 21.
