I was drawn to The Woman because of its premise. Not the premise of the story itself, but the premise regarding how it was made. It is being reported that this film was made on a $1,000 budget in a very short amount of time by a female director (Rose Kreider). There are times while watching that you will not be able to even tell this fact. There are other times when you will clearly be able to tell this fact.
The story focuses on a college age man named Noah (Aleksey Weyman). He is haunted in his dreams and his life by the image of a woman whom he's never met that he obsesses about repeatedly in his mind. He doesn't have many friends or connections in life just his mother, Georgia (Jennifer Corbidge).
There is a beautifully executed opening sequence to the film that sets the groundwork for what will follow. The problem this movie unfortunately suffers from is the fact that it's lead actor is actually a pretty good actor and looks well enough on screen until he opens his mouth to talk. Aleksey Weyman struggles to deliver his lines. This is especially prevalent in a particular scene with his mother Georgia played by Jennifer Corbidge who acts brilliantly.
With all of those things said I definitely believe that Alexey Weyman shows promise on the screen and felt like he should have been right for the role he just needs more practice and I didn't enjoy seeing him overall. One of the few things this film suffers from is a repetitive behavior. We see a little too many drone shots where they don't necessarily fit into the story or help to sell the story it's just the filmmakers letting us know that they own a drone. These kind of shots work very effectively at the opening of the film and in its first scenes after that they grow tiresome and feel overused. The same could be said about the scenes of our character Noah waking up in bed to his alarm clock. Not only is a shot like that infamously overused in small budget indie films like this but it is revisited several times throughout the film.
I can actually appreciate the slow pacing and the build up to the characters mission and overall purpose because I am moderately interested through wonderful cinematography a great cinematic score and just a general interest of learning about what happened at the beginning of the film.
But then that brings another problem the runtime. The woman is roughly an hour long. While most of the time watching this you might feel like that's too long however by the time we reach the end we're left feeling like that's too short. The film ends prematurely. He feels like we should be continuing the journey of our character that we've slowly come to learn about. Instead we're fed another drone shot and the film abruptly ends.
For a first time filmmaker, Rose Kreider should learn and grow from this process. She should be glad to know that her film leaves her general audience wanting more. Unfortunately the once feel more like I missed step rather than a clever cliffhanger.
