‘I wanted to make an ice-cold, suffocating film, until the water is up to your lips’

It started with one sentence that filmmaker Coco Schrijber heard when she was in Mexico for the research of her film How to Meet a Mermaid (2016). A psychiatrist who led a support group for battered women in Mexico City told her, “Women kill differently than men.”

That sentence, there’s a movie in it, she thought immediately. It became the starting point of her documentary Look What You Made Me Do, which premiered at Idfa and can be seen in cinemas from this week. In it, Schrijber follows three women, one Finnish, one Italian and one Dutch, who lived with a violent man and eventually killed him. A fourth, unrecognizable woman, still in an abusive relationship, talks about all the ways she’s tried to find help.

In her Amsterdam apartment, Schrijber (61), who lives on the Canary Island of La Palma, talks about her film.

Do women kill differently than men?

‘Women are usually not strong enough to knock or strangle someone, they have to be intelligent and inventive. As a result, they come across as calculating and cold, and therefore extra malicious. But we make that judgment without knowing the facts.

“It’s not that I condone murder, of course, but there are times when you just have to make that choice. And this film is about that gruesome choice.’

It is rare for women to kill their partner. The reverse, on the other hand, happens shockingly often, Schrijber tells the viewer. Worldwide, at least 30,000 women are killed each year by their (former) partners. And of the total number of women who are murdered, the vast majority are killed in their own homes. Schrijber: ‘We women learn from an early age: be careful on the street, put on a wide coat, and so on. We take everything into account outside, but at home we are much more in danger.’

Your film is about violence against women and yet you choose to portray them as perpetrators.

‘I didn’t want to make a film about victimhood, about pathetic women crying about what happened to them. Many of these already exist, and rightly so. But I wanted to show that there are also women who take a different approach, who resist.’

Why are murderesses so interesting?

“Because our ideas about them say a lot about the way we look at women, as passive and nurturing. Women bear children, they give life, how can such a person take a life?

‘If a woman commits murder, we quickly think: then she must be a hysteric, or crazy. Research shows that women who have committed murder are often wrongly attributed a personality disorder. All three of the women in my film had no mental health problems, according to tests they had to take during the trial. But they barely managed to prove: I’m not crazy, I did this knowingly because I saw no other way out. That’s a message that many people don’t want to hear.’

The women in your film talk about how they got stuck in their relationship. Italian Rosalba says her husband threatened to kill the children if she left him. Do you want to demonstrate that there was no other way out than murder?

“We are all so full of prejudices. When you hear a woman tell about something that has happened to her, you immediately think: that would never happen to me, or: then you leave him anyway. I wanted to take those ideas away from the viewer.

‘Rosalba explains very precisely how the violence creeps in, the unrecognizable woman talks about all the failed attempts she has made to get help. In general, leaving an abusive relationship is the most dangerous moment. And of the women who do manage to escape, half are later killed.’

Women are often held responsible for their husbands’ violence, as we see in your film.

“That’s how we are brought up. When something bad happened to me in the past, my mother always said: you must have made it. And boys get along: if you are bullied, you hit back.

‘In addition, it is a very human mechanism to blame someone else for your actions. When you cross such a high threshold as hitting your sweetheart, you think: I’m not like that at all, so this can’t be my fault. Look what you made me do. The roles are now reversed in the title of my film. There is a kind of satisfaction in that. That’s not neat, of course, but you can still feel it.’

What was it like to be so close to those women?

‘When media reports about a murderess, they often portray a haggard woman, disheveled hair, wild look. That you think: what kind of person is this? I’m almost convinced myself. The Italian Rosalba was an ice-cold killer in the newspaper. Oh, I thought, do I want to talk to her? But it’s a cutie. Such a loving, humble woman. The Dutch Rachel is a hard worker and a real mother animal. Laura, the Finnish girl, has a sense of humor and is not easily put in a corner. And she was nine months pregnant, which I thought was a nice image for the film.

‘I wanted to follow them during their daily activities: shopping, putting on their make-up, feeding the ducks with the children. Because murderesses do ordinary things. I also wanted to zoom in on the run-up to the murder. I was concerned with the mechanism of that decision, because that’s what it is, a ‘deliberate act’, as Rachel calls it.’

Is it important for women to get angry?

‘The point is that you, as a human being, wrestle yourself from all those ideas about what men and women are like. No, I’m not passive, yes, I also feel anger and sometimes I also feel like hitting on it. I don’t, but if I’m really in danger, I’m sure I’m going to hit back, right?

‘I’m not an angry person at all. At least, the research for this film made me very angry: how normal we think it is that women should always be on their guard, how little is being done about it. But I don’t hit and scream. The angrier I get, the more icy. I also wanted to make a film like that, a subdued, ice-cold film that becomes increasingly suffocating. Until the moment the water is up to your lips and you think: now it’s allowed, that’s it.’

Explicit violence can only be seen at one moment in Look What You Made Me Do. The film includes footage from security cameras, in which a Brazilian lawyer is screaming and resisting being pushed into an elevator by her husband. Then you see her fall from her apartment on the fourth floor into the street, and a moment later her husband drags her dead body into the elevator.

Why are you showing these gruesome images?

Domestic violence is invisible. It runs in one in five or six families, but we don’t know who or what it looks like. I can quote that number of 30,000 murders per year, but it’s hard to understand what that means. If I actually show it once, you can do that in your head times 30 thousand. That has to come in.

“I have written a letter to the lawyer’s family and have been given permission to use the images. They are just on the internet and had already been on TV everywhere in Brazil. You see the evidence, you see the murder, and it still took him two years to be convicted.’

There will be people who say that your movie justifies murder.

‘Yes, people always want to be morally right, but fuck offI have no patience for that anymore. Normally I like nuance in my work. My previous films are built up slowly, there is room for reflection. But this topic, it just has to come like a punch in the face: that’s how it is, and it hurts.’