Travis Stevens’ “Jakob’s Wife” is a film about a universal fear and the horror of becoming a housewife. Built on a clever premise, the film is executed seamlessly. It’s a great example of a B-movie done right: resilient and resourceful, with more ideas than special effects. Stevens creates a thoughtful and very relatable world in “Jakob’s Wife,” a spooky story about what happens when your spouse sucks the life out of you.
Barbara Crampton is Anne, a blonde, blue-eyed housewife with a blank face. She’s spent the past thirty years in the background, while her husband (Larry Fessenden) preaches to the biggest congregation in town, offering advice on everything from marriage to baby-making. Anne does the housework, gardening, cooking, and cleaning, only to be irritated by her husband’s loud chewing at dinner and louder snoring at night. So when her high school boyfriend (Robert Rusler) arrives back in town, she’s excited to feel a little spark of emotion again, though, naturally, something terrible happens when they meet at a shady, abandoned water mill.
If the noises and shifting shadows are a bit strange, it’s probably just an old and creaky water mill. What neither of the characters realize is that an ancient vampire is lurking on the premises, drooling over his next victims. Tom, loses his neck in deliciously gruesome fashion, while Anne gets a hickey with permanent side effects. Next thing you know, she dresses in red skirts, eats her steak raw, and drinks blood out of wine glasses while listening to Bach (you know, vampire stuff).
The script, by Stevens, Kathy Charles, and Mark Steensland, has a lot of fun turning vampirism into feminist liberation, as the new Anne takes matters into her own hands. Husband Jakob has to choose between his faith and his undead, but newly reinvigorated wife, and he goes through his own I was blind, now I see transformation, which ultimately means paying more attention to the woman he fell in love with 30 years ago. Furthermore, it means moving a few bodies his wife ate in the kitchen.
“Jakob’s Wife,” which refers to a character in the bible, is a slow-burn thriller, punctuated by a few explosively graphic moments. Stevens effectively builds suspense but he doesn’t go for conventional scares, especially with a vampire-in-training as our heroine. Rather, Anne’s kills are more like Nosferatu on training wheels, since she doesn’t really know what she’s doing.
“Jakob’s Wife” only intermittently touches the highest registers of spill-your-guts-out violence. It remains in the realm of the moral, the spiritual, the human-scaled deaths and decisions, which makes for an even more explicit movie. It’s an absorbing (if sometimes preachy) look at the horrors of becoming a housewife, and a splash of holy water on the demons of assigned gender roles. [B]
“Jakob’s Wife” is in theaters and on VOD now.
