Polytechnique directed by Denis Villeneuve, is a dramatization of the 1989 Montreal massacre of multiple female engineering students. This film focuses on a male student navigating the massacre for the majority of the film’s run time. The performances and minimal dialogue in this film certainly make this an unnerving film to watch. Littered with the screams of the actors portraying the engineering students, this could be mistaken as a gaudy horror film. However, this is far from a fictionalized horror.
This Villeneuve classic is undoubtedly one of the most emotionally brutal films of the 2000s, yet I appreciate the honesty of the storytelling. Polytechnique encourages its audience to ask itself if it truly understands the truth of misogyny.
"this is an ongoing dialectic, and if the film was ever intended to exorcise the tragedy of the École Polytechinque Massacre, the tensions and systemic entropy that it portrays, remain harrowingly relevant in our own age of misogynistic rampages"
— Anton Bitel
A dramatization of the Montreal Massacre of 1989 where several female engineering students were murdered by an unstable misogynist.
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