We Had It Coming

On losing a loved one to prostitution, lethal drug abuse and eventually suicide, a grief-stricken sister and her relatively new girlfriend resolve to track down the pimp they hold responsible. Their journey takes them to Montreal, where they encounter the young madame who recruits girls into her nefarious underworld. Stylistic directorial choices lend the film’s themes a cinematic dimension, an illustrative example being the facelessness of the pimp through most of the film serving as damning visual attestation to the faceless, evanescent world of sex trafficking. His threatening invocations echo as his whispers to each desperate woman vacillate between baseless sweet nothings and bone-chilling threats. Atrocities and violence are shot from long point-of-view angles, a distancing technique making the crimes all the more horrific. The film suggests that all men are complicit to some extent in the quagmire of toxic masculinity that permeates contemporary society like a coating of slime. This is artful filmmaking of the highest order, offering a fresh take on a story that is all too common in today’s world. (Whistler Film Festival)