UNRULY – Review by Nadine Whitney
Danish writer/director Malou Reymann’s Unruly is a devasting film based on a corrective asylum that was set up for women in 1923 (and remained open until 1961) the Sprogø Women’s Institute. Although it was seen as a progressive place to foster “defective girls” until they are ready to be reintroduced into public life, it was in fact used as a warning for young women to remain morally acceptable in Danish society or face the consequences. Reymann’s film is a fictional story about Maren (Emilie Kroyer Koppel) a poor and rebellious seventeen-year-old whose crime it was to offend public morals by drinking and dancing at Jazz clubs and losing her factory job as a seamstress. Maren is placed into the care of the Child Welfare Service where the zealous Doctor Wildenskov (Anders Heinrichsen) declares her mentally deficient, anti-social, and “immoral” (which is coded as a mental illness in women and has a history that is too long to list). Wildenskov decides that Maren will be placed on Sprogø for her rehabilitation, but underestimates Maren’s will and tenacity.
Once on Sprogø, Maren meets Sørine (Jessica Dinnage) a particular favourite of Miss Nielsen (Lene Maria Christensen) the seemingly benign head of the institute. Sprogø itself is an idyllic island with farmland, blooming flowers, comfortable lodgings. It is far from the asylums of years past where chains and cages held patients, but it is a prison dressed in pretty clothing. There is a darkness to the place that goes beyond the “Reflection room” where misbehaving girls are strapped to a bed until they “calm down.” The darkness is that despite all its modernity, there is no real hope for the girls there and the notion that good behaviour will set them free is a lie.
Sørine is perhaps the best behaved of all the women in the institute and is threatened by Maren’s instinctive rebellion. Having been there for years she understands that obedience is perhaps the only key to eventual freedom. Sørine and Maren clash until Maren becomes aware of what is keeping Sørine from speaking out – a daughter that was taken from her at birth (also the reason Sørine was sent to the institution because she gave birth to a “bastard”).
As the film progresses the audience understands that the purpose of Sprogø isn’t really to train and rehabilitate these women so they can be released into controlled family care after their time there, but it is to keep them in the institute as long as possible to ensure their “defective minds” do not foster a new generation of children who will inherit their mothers’ mental “retardation.” Denmark established enforced sterilization for those they considered unstable. To be even eligible for release each young woman would have to undergo sterilization.
Maren becomes pregnant while on the island (which is blamed solely on her because immorality is the disease she carries, and the father is considered innocent). At first, she is terrified of bringing a new life into the world because it means that she will never be allowed to leave Sprogø, but as her kinship with Sørine blossoms and her belly grows there is a beauty that Reymann crafts that speaks to a quiet sisterhood of support between the girls on the island. The childlike Elise (Amalie Drud Abildgaard) is especially enamoured with the idea of life, any kind of life – from songs of butterflies, to dreams of America. Within the soul crushing institute there are moments of joy, although those moments are all too brief.
The complacency of the women in charge of the girls is chilling. Nurses, caretakers, and especially the closeted Miss Nielsen allow the hypocritical patriarchal standards of men like Wildenskov to guide their hands in crushing the souls and dreams of young women who are not, in fact, defective. A nurse who gently teaches Maren how to breastfeed her daughter also helps the Doctor rip the infant away from Maren and drugs her into submission and then sterilization. Miss Nielsen instinctively knows that she is hurting the girls under her care but toes the line. When Sørine points out her two-facedness Nielsen knows she carries shame for what has been done to her charges and that she has destroyed lives. Nielsen is also serving herself because if her nature became known she too would be institutionalised.
Unruly documents a particularly dark chapter in Denmark’s history, but one that has echoes around the world (forced sterilization has been instituted in many colonised indigenous communities, was a core tenet of Fascist eugenics, and is still considered in some places a reasonable action when dealing with people with disabilities). Malou Reymann’s film might be set in 1933 but is sadly all too relevant today. Unruly is unsettling and tragic and made all the more effective by its empathetic and unsparing lens – a film that is unabashedly feminist and eternally relevant.
