Recently I've been working my way through Jon Knautz's filmography and the thing that stands out to me in particular with his films is the amount of focus he gives to his antagonists.
In both The Cleaning Lady and to a lesser extent Girl House we get to see the events which shaped our villains into the broken people they have become. This is a technique which is extremely prominent in 2015's Goddess Of Love and it is easily the strongest thing the film has going for it.
Goddess Of Love is a stalker film told from the point of view of the stalker. The film is about a stripper named Venus who becomes enamoured with a client and begins a whirlwind relationship with him until she suspects him of infidelity and becomes more and more obsessive and mistrusting as the evidence begins to unravel before her.
The interesting thing this film does is that it makes us empathise with Venus. We actually understand why she becomes as paranoid as she does, she has some very legitimate reasons for being unhappy with how she's being treated and you really do understand why she is behaving in an increasingly erratic way.
Even prior to the added pressure of the breakdown of her new relationship we see that she is self medicating by smoking opium to block out auditory and visual hallucinations she's experiencing,
and though this does make her an unreliable narrator we really do feel and see the film through her eyes.
She's humanised to us instead of demonised, she's shown to be a talented pianist, she practices ballet and is depicted at first as being caring and empathetic. The filmmakers made a very
conscious choice to show that Venus is more than just a psychotic monster.
All of this works so well but then amounts to very little in the end,
when all it needed to do was give the audience what it was hinting at and promising for the past hour, a satisfyingly bloody and brutal climax. Which I know the director is capable of, I've seen him do it twice already in his previous films.
Ultimately although I enjoyed my time with Goddess Of Love that ending just didn't sit well with me and that's a shame because there's a lot I really liked about this film but I have to judge the movie as a whole and with that ending it doesn't earn a place on my monthly recommendations list, it was so close.
If you're going to watch a Jon Knautz film, make it 2018's The Cleaning Lady, it's his best work by far.
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