In Look What You Made Me Do the main characters Laura, Rachel and Rosalba are serenaded with cheesy love songs about broken hearts. In real life though, it’s their bones that are broken. Laura, Rachel and Rosalba took the blows until they said: enough! For some, that moment came quickly, for others only after ten years. Nineteen year old Laura grabbed a knife, Rachel a gun, and Italian Rosalba mixed poison into meatballs. Basta! says Rosalba. Choose for yourself, says Laura. Indeed, these women chose for themselves, as did Artemisia Gentileschi, the famous Italian painter who slits the throat of her rapist in the hair raising painting that epitomises this film: embrace the murderer within, and you will be free. Look What You Made Me Do begins with a light hearted quote in which a girl complains to her mother that a boy is hitting her in the playground. “That's because he likes you,” the mother says, and so one woman prepares the next generation for a life where violence is normal. The opening scene is a brutal fight in the snow with blood flowing. Laura, heavily pregnant, tells her story calmly, like a marriage gradually suffocating you until you see no way out. Meanwhile, she’s getting ready. While she is sticking on her false eyelashes, we hear the emergency call, and the murder of her boyfriend in the Finnish nig ht, in the snow. Rachel tells how she shot her husband in the head, just at the moment when her daughter walks in. Rosalba is cooking, chopping onions as she explains that the accusation “Why didn’t you leave?” was never an option. A fourth woman, hidden in red shadow because her life is in danger, tells us about her abusive husband. Laura, Rachel and Rosalba advise and encourage her. Never believe in a man’s repentance, Rosalba warns. Will the red woman become the perpetrator? Is there another way out?
Once we witness, through a security camera in a parking garage, how a man kills his wife: one example among the 30,000 murdered women each year. In between the women’s stories, a cleaner mops and scratches at the blood on the wall of a murdered woman a chore he faces once or twice a week. Laura, Rachel and Rosalba saw the murder of their husbands as the only solution. It is obvious that their heinous acts weigh heavily on them. Look What You Made Me Do is a film about fear, anger and decision. It’s the ultimate revenge movie but with a happy ending: Laura, Rachel and Rosalba didn’t join the never ending list of the 30,000 plus women who are killed every year by their (ex)partners. They have survived.