She Said (2022) Review

New York Times investigated reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor end up breaking one of the most important stories of a generation, that would go on to change everything! When they focus on the subject of sexual assault in the work place and Hollywood becomes the target.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The story and scandal surrounding the behaviour of Harvey Weinstein is something that we got to know a lot about when it broke in 2017. The absolutely trauma of how many women were impacted directly by the producer kept getting bigger each day as more came forward to share the experiences they had with him. Throughout this film we actually get to see how it was not easy at all for Twohey and Kantor to actually get women to go on the record against him and how it really took a lot of work to get it all out.

There’s something that just fully works in the best possible manner with journalists doing research in films, following on from All The President’s Men and Spotlight are my favourites. It’s engaging, tension is built and quite frankly it just feels so dangerous and scary at times. With threats coming in from random people towards the journalists.

Megan Twohey had been working on a story about Donald Trump and the abuse claims from women around him over the years in the build up towards him running for President, I mean we all know what happened with that! Her experience in that field then made her the perfect choice to work alongside Jodi Kantor on the Hollywood scandal which was fully starting to focus on Harvey Weinstein, it appears though that he wasn’t fully the target of it all to begin with. His name was the most frequent and a pattern started to emerge, the fact that so many women had actually received settlements in order to keep the accusations quiet was also something that was terrifying.

The women targeted by Weinstein mainly seemed to be impressionable and young, around 20-22 years old when something happened to them. They were either employees across the different offices or aspiring actresses, using manipulation and being so easy for him to stop careers it really was utterly brutal to hear how he did this and that it was common for women to protect themselves in different ways.

It was never going to be an easy film to watch given the subject matter within it but I truly feel it is a very important film. Important to really see how the #MeToo movement really started and the work that had to be put in behind the scenes. Hearing how much he dismissed the claims was quite sick really, as that many women all lying? It really did just not make sense at all. The sheer numbers is quite frankly awful and the fact that it seems as though it was actually quite a well known thing within Hollywood makes you feel utterly sick.

Travelling not only around the US to different states but also going to different countries in a bid to try and get at least one of the women go on the record and really help start the movement. A bigger named actresses who people would recognise was another that they really wanted to help with the article and make more people take notice of it. That was not easy as quite frankly everyone was still terrified of him and the power he had.

Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan were both utterly breathtaking to watch throughout the film and really putting it all into the roles of the journalists. This was just fantastic casting and they had such great chemistry together on screen. Support from Patricia Clarkson was also good to see, even if I did not recognise her at first! Ashley Judd deserves so much credit for playing herself and she was one of the big names who agreed to take a stand, it must not have been easy to film her scenes and go through the trauma again.