sageblaze

Okay, to be fair, I'm only two-thirds through, but already I'm rooting against the protagonist Ellen and for the supposed antagonist Paula. Ellen is a super annoying and passive aggressive Karen who stalks & sabotages her co-workers. Despite appearing completely incompetent at her job, her superiors fawn over-- does her husband (who she treats like sh-i-te). She suddenly gets pregnant and discovers the value of playing the new mom/baby card to get all the attention and manipulate people. Who's to say what will be revealed in the final episode, but something pretty bad needs to be revealed about Paula to make me hate her more Ellen.

It's basically a story about toxic femininity and women turning against each other at work. Not far away from reality in certain ways.

This film has long been criticized for its supposed one-dimensional, black-and-white rendering of domestic violence. While on the rarer side, there really are abusers this bad. Sometimes, DV workers have the same reaction to DV survivors' stories-- they have a hard time believing them because their stories are so outrageously & unbelievable awful, even though the experienced are true in most cases. I think in more recent times, we've seen some real pretty one-dimensional villains in public life (some with DV backgrounds) that may make us re-evaluate if this portrayal might just be a little more realistic than we once thought.

This is well acted with slick high production value, noughties' style, which is an added bonus.