Give Me An A celebrated its world premiere on October 16 at the seventh annual Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. All 15 segments in this horror anthology were written and directed by women and explore the post-Roe America that is hurtling toward us.
Roe v. Wade was a monumental Supreme Court ruling that the U.S. Constitution conferred the right to have an abortion, and struck down any statutes that criminalized abortion due to a person’s constitutional right to privacy. Its downfall was a watershed moment for women and the LGBTQ+ community. It opened the floodgates for discriminatory laws denying access to safe abortions, gender-affirming care, and other life-saving healthcare.
Give Me An A is an ambitious project that successfully encapsulates the frenzy and terror felt at this moment. At the post-screening Q&A, executive producer and director Natasha Halevi spoke about how the film was conceptualized, written, and filmed at breakneck speed in the weeks after the Supreme Court ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade.
And I am genuinely in awe of the power of women to Make Shit Happen and deliver a polished and nuanced work of art at a time when most of us have only just begun considering what a post-Roe society would look like. Even the first vignette tackles the immediate hopelessness felt during the early hours of June 24, 2022, and makes for an effectively disorienting introduction that I wouldn’t dare spoil for you. The breathlessly written stories in Give Me An A still feel meticulously crafted and are well performed, and you will see familiar faces in Virginia Madsen (Candyman), Alyssa Milano (Charmed), and Gina Torres (Firefly). The film masterfully uses thriller, sci-fi, and body horror elements to explore the nightmare of a post-Roe reality. Some stories even play out as fantasies where poetic justice finally comes for The Patriarchy.
At its best, Give Me an A feels like a delirious Twilight Zone episode that takes place inside a woman’s mind for the past four months. And what have we been thinking about? Well, we explore the contradictory argument of life beginning at conception, as noted in the segment titled “God’s Plan.” We ask ourselves, “why is this all on us?” — the same question the women asked in “Vasectopia.” We lash out at The Man and men on our personal “Crucible Island.” But we are mostly preoccupied with our mistrust of institutions and each other, like the women in “The Last Store.”
Give Me an A is a smart, engaging, and timely body of work that we so desperately need during this crossroads in American history. My only critique is that the film often stumbled on attempts to explore how a post-Roe society will impact people of multiple marginalized identities, like women of color and trans people. The film also did not include transgender stories and was more concerned with giving cisgender men a comeuppance that neither empowers nor liberates us.
The weakest anthologies were the ones that were centered on cisgender men receiving some kind of 9 to 5 fantastical consequence instead of exploring more diverse stories of the post-Roe hell that awaits us. I was also disappointed in “Abigail” for making Black and Native women a silent chorus serving only to Z-snap and roll their necks in agreement when a fictional Abigail Adams reminds her husband to “remember the ladies.” This Hamilton-esque attempt at diversifying suffragette history glosses over white feminism’s shortcomings and is a painful dismissal of the disproportionate effects that restrictions to reproductive care will have on Black and Brown women.
But this criticism is coming from a place of genuine desire for more stories. Give Me an A is a necessary film and an electrifying call to action. I would welcome several Give Me An A volumes. This issue touches all of us, and I want stories from more of us. We are only at the tip of the proverbial iceberg of this fight for bodily autonomy and the right to choose whatever life we want. Give Me An A rises to this occasion and can hopefully grow to include more voices in the fight for bodily autonomy.