I always happen to find a sort of throughline in films when it comes time to bulk up on watching by way of festival season, and one of the most common is usually a kind of redemption arc by way of feminine rage. While those films are still here this year, 2024’s Panic Fest dug deep into the seedier side of women’s desires.
In the face of social constructs that tell us our most valuable asset and currency is our outward appearance, there are only a set number of acceptable responses. Either we bend to it and lose ourselves in the process, or we fight against it and embrace what makes us different as its own sort of valuable. Women have always been bucking the system from the inside in one way or another, because it has always been designed to oppress us, but there is an element of it that is difficult to express without gaining more than a few sideways looks. Writer/director Nick Funess’s YOUNG BLONDES, STALKED AND MURDERED digs into one such element with surprising and understated finesse.
Stacy (Samantha Carroll) is a struggling actress who does not want to admit to anyone how much she’s struggling. She is continually passed over for roles, seemingly always in favor of someone who is younger, prettier, and blonder than she is. All her actress friends appear more successful, staying booked and busy, so when her best friend Josie (Elle Chapman) offers Stacy the chance to pick up something Josie herself says she’ll be too busy for, it comes across more like a gift than a pity offering. Meanwhile, there’s a serial killer on the loose, whose target demographic is the titular young blondes. In what might first come across as an incredibly unusual conversation to be having over coffee, Stacy and Josie trade stories about the latest victims, and Josie notes that it’s “kind of flattering” to be “picked” by the killer.
We stay with Stacy for much of the film, alternating perspectives only a few times and, seemingly, with the killer himself. In fact, Corentin Leroux’s cinematography is one of the most interesting tools used to tell this story. Blocking the shots in certain ways allows the audience various points to feel the heightened anxieties and possibilities that come with being a young woman living alone in a city and does an equally good job of keeping us along with the way Stacy must be thinking.
It’s clear as the film goes on that Stacy is jealous of all her more successful friends, and desperately wants to fit the image that others are telling her is the ideal in order to get work. Being told, in whatever tone it happens, that 25 is too old to be playing a role will do a number on your personal perception. What YOUNG BLONDES does so well is tap into this anxiety and hunger, even when it means being hungry for things it doesn’t make any sense to want. Josie’s offhand wondering about being chosen by a serial killer with a Type as “flattering” should say all there is to say about the ways we push young women into molds we deem socially acceptable. It’s horrific, in actuality, to be targeted, but when your whole life and livelihood revolves around fitting into a Type in order to succeed, it’s easy to see the way it could be twisted into both a slight unreality (“I can think this way because surely there’s no way it will actually happen to me!”) and a twisted desire (“if they want me as a victim surely all these people who have shunned me are wrong! I am young enough and blonde enough!”). Both lines of thought are equally insidious, to be sure, and yet there is a direct line to trace them back to the way young women are taught from the jump to think about themselves and their bodies.
YOUNG BLONDES‘ premise is both simple and sinister, and it has unexpectedly stuck with me for longer and in ways I would not have expected. We get inside Stacy’s insecure, jealous, all too commonly troubled head and come out with a sticky sense that something is wrong that goes far beyond the California streets having a pretty body count.
Tags: Corentin Leroux, Elle Chapman, Film Festivals, Nick Funess, Panic Fest, Panic Fest 2024, Samantha Carroll, Young Blondes Stalked and Murdered
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