The Glorious Lady (1919), dir. George Irving

tw: infertility

I finally watched The Glorious Lady (1919) recently. One of the first silent movies I ever saw was The Flapper (1920), starring Olive Thomas, and I've been meaning to check out more of her films for years now.

Thomas's reputation sadly tends to precede her for all the wrong reasons. Her untimely death in 1920, aged just 25, was major news at the time. Over 100 years later, it still tends to receive more attention and interest than her short but promising career. To combat that, I wanted to review The Glorious Lady (1919) just like I would any other film.

Just to note, the version I watched was the one uploaded by the Eye Filmmuseum - meaning all the intertitles are in Dutch with English captions, and the names of some characters are different from what's listed on IMDB. To avoid confusion, I'll just be using the names that appear in the translated intertitles, not the ones on the IMDB cast list.

Olive Thomas is Ivis, a commoner's daughter who catches the eye of the Duke of Loame (Matt Moore) when they both compete in a horse race between landowners and tenants. Ivis is in the lead when the Duke falls from his horse. Rather than seizing the chance to win, she turns back to help him and is badly injured as a result. As she recovers, the two fall in love.

The Duke's mother, who constantly reminds her son that he is the last of his line and needs to settle down and produce an heir ASAP, had hoped that he would marry Lady Hilda Nearing, a fellow aristocrat. Hilda's brother, Dr Neil Nearing, had also banked on his sister marrying the wealthy Duke so that he could pay off his gambling debts. In short, pretty much no one is happy about the Duke's decision to marry Ivis.

The Nearings and their friends begin scheming to break up the newlyweds in order to give Hilda another shot at becoming the Duchess of Loame. Dr Nearing tells Ivis that her injuries have left her unable to have children, knowing that this will be a dealbreaker for the Duke's overbearing mother and weigh heavily on Ivis's conscience.

Many silent films feature relatable themes and compelling narratives that can still resonate today. The Glorious Lady isn't one of them. Most of the characters are terrible, no good, very bad rich people and the great dilemma we are presented with is the prospect of the Duke of Loame dying without an heir and being the last in a privileged line of titled aristocrats. Your mileage may vary in your own social circles but most people I know in 2025 would be wildly indifferent to this.

The main issue, though, is that there just isn't enough Olive Thomas in this Olive Thomas movie. Thomas's talent really shines through when her character is actually given something to do, like pretending to get sloppy drunk during a party and angrily demanding a divorce in a self-sacrificing attempt to push the Duke away, leaving him free to marry someone who can give him an heir.

Unfortunately, these scenes are few and far between. Ivis is introduced as a spirited young woman but after becoming the Duchess of Loame, she comes down with a bad case of damsel-itis and spends most of the film just kind of… falling prey to the machinations of others, never realising that she and her husband are being manipulated by almost everyone around them.

The Glorious Lady then has its heroine leave and go missing after the party, abruptly shifting focus to her husband and the people plotting against them for the final third of the film. The big problem with this decision isn't just the lack of Olive Thomas on screen but also the fact that none of the other characters have her charisma or even a brain cell between them.

The Duke laments that he can't find his wife anywhere and that even classified ads offering rewards for information on her whereabouts have turned up nothing, only for the camera to cut to Ivis sitting on a park bench in broad daylight, before visiting the same detective's office that her husband is just leaving. It's like no one told the Duke that searching for Ivis would involve having to actually go outside and look for her.

Then there's the fact that the Nearings' whole scheme is unhinged and deeply flawed from the outset. Ivis and the Duke are already married and living together by the time Dr Nearing decides to tell Ivis that she can't have children. The entire plan depends on them being able to convince the newlyweds to divorce before Ivis starts eating for two, and then just kind of… hoping that the Duke will pick Hilda for a rebound marriage.

(spoiler alert) This doesn't work out for them, even when Dr Nearing hires a shady detective to help lay a trap for the couple, which somehow manages to be completely half-baked and ridiculously overcomplicated at the same time, backfiring so badly that it actually reunites them.

I'm not even sure a spoiler alert is really needed here to discuss the ending, which is both painfully predictable and feels like a huge missed opportunity. Rather than demonstrating that there are multiple ways to start a family or that a woman's worth isn't dependent on motherhood, the final twist is that Ivis is pregnant and can provide that blueblooded son everyone was so fixated on after all. Yay.

It might seem like I'm expecting a lot from a film with a 1919 release date, but determined young women taking charge of their own destinies were much more prevalent in silent films that most people assume, so it's not completely out of left field to imagine a version of The Glorious Lady in which Ivis's happy ending isn't completely dependent on her ability to birth a son. Adoption across class divides and the concept of found family were also popular themes in 1910s cinema, so it's lowkey disappointing that adopting is never even considered when everyone thinks that Ivis is infertile. (end spoilers)

Instead, we have a movie with a clichéd ending and far too much focus on intrigue and scheming among far less compelling characters. Lest anyone think I’m being too harsh on a film that audiences in 1919 would have lapped up, it's worth pointing out that a review in the January 1920 issue of Photoplay magazine describes the film as "archaic hodge-podge" and the storyline as "so absurd that neither star nor director should be blamed for the result".

However, they also note that Olive Thomas makes "heroic efforts to impart life and reality" to the film, concluding that Thomas "is so lovely that no picture in which she appears can be utterly bad… so after all you get your money's worth." As I mentioned up top, Olive Thomas's talent and work tend to be unfairly overshadowed by sensationalised retellings of her unfortunate death, so any contemporary praise for her performances is worth repeating.

Heck (2020), dir. Kyle Edward Ball

tw: neglect, mental health issues, cancer

I watched Heck (2020) again recently to see if I could get anything from it, since it mostly just left me confused and frustrated when I first saw it, two years ago. All I knew going in was that a lot of people had loved it, and that it had been a kind of test run for director Kyle Edward Ball’s debut feature film, Skinamarink (2022). Uploaded to Ball’s YouTube channel, Bitesized Nightmares, the one-sentence synopsis offered in the video description revealed almost nothing: ‘A little kid wakes up in the middle of [the] night to the sound of his mom's television blaring.’

The first time I watched it, I wasn't prepared for just how abstract it would be, and it felt like I spent the entire time waiting for some kind of clarity that never came. I couldn’t understand the hype for a film in which almost nothing actually happens, a film with minimal dialogue and no discernable plot points or even named characters to anchor it, leaving the viewer… lost. It wasn’t until rewatching it a few weeks ago and reading through the comments section of the video to try to understand how and why it resonated with other people that I finally realised that feeling of being lost is the entire point.

Heck is an experimental short horror film which asks a lot from the viewer over its 29-minute runtime. There is no real narrative and, while it's technically still linear, time in Heck functions very, very strangely. There are only two characters, a small boy and his mother, who is rarely seen. As Heck is primarily shot from the child’s first-person viewpoint, we never actually see him. Dialogue is muffled, distorted, at times completely unintelligible if not for the subtitles. The cinematography feels equally murky and disorientating, an effect accomplished through low lighting, grainy film, and a shaky camera that tilts and sways erratically at odd angles.

While many viewers commented that Heck reminded them of nightmares they had when they were young, several commenters identifying themselves as children of addicts described Heck as sickeningly reminiscent of their own childhoods, spent wandering around their home in the dark, alone and neglected, without a capable adult to care for them. Once I started trying to imagine what that must feel like, something clicked for me.

I started to see Heck as a symbolic depiction of what it’s like to live inside your own head when you have suffered from depression, anxiety, and ADHD from a young age. Psychologists will talk about allowing the rational adult part of you to help and support your inner child. What happens when you’ve been struggling for so long that it feels like the rational adult is long gone, and all that’s left is the inner child - scared, lost, confused, isolated, and completely helpless?

“Mom? Mom? The lights are broken.”

The kid wanders aimlessly around his house. Cartoons play loudly on an old television. It’s dark apart from the flickering glow of the TV. He calls out to his mom that the lights aren’t working, but receives no answer and can’t find her anywhere. He uses a small torch to light his way as best he can as he searches the house for her.

It’s been dark for a while now. You try reaching out to the rational adult. You try to tell them that something is wrong, something you don't know how to fix on your own. No response. That’s okay. You can cope by yourself, for a little while.

“Mom, are you down there?”

The kid approaches the basement door but doesn’t try to open it, instead calling out to his mom again. He will return to the basement door several times throughout the film in search of her. He picks up the house phone and tries saying hello into the receiver. He either doesn’t know how to actually use it, or doesn’t know any numbers to call.

You know that the rational adult must still be around somewhere, but you can’t find them. They’re either in a place you can’t reach or a place you’re afraid to go. It’s still dark. You’re starting to worry now. You try to reach out to other people, but you’re not really sure how to.

“Mom. Mom! I can’t… I can’t open the door.”

The kid shouts to his mom that he is going over to a friend’s house, only to find that the door which leads outside won’t open. We hear muffled, persistent knocking and banging sounds, confusion becoming frustration.

Trying to reach out to people keeps getting harder. The few friends you have always seem to be too far away and plans keep falling through. You feel cut off. You seem to be completely locked inside your own dysfunctional brain now. The rational adult is still nowhere to be found and can’t or won’t open the door to let you out.

‘1 sleep later’

No light creeps in from outside and no other voices can be heard aside from the shrill, oversaturated cartoons playing on TV. Intertitles are the only real marker of time passing in Heck, progressing gradually at first from ‘1 sleep later’ through to ‘5 sleeps later’. After 5 sleeps, time starts to move erratically. The next intertitle suddenly skips to ‘23 sleeps later’, the next to ‘49 sleeps later’, and so on, leaving increasingly long gaps for the viewer to bridge with their imagination.

The radio silence from the rational adult is unbearable and you rely on constant background noise to try to fill it, to avoid being alone with your own thoughts in the quiet and the dark. Days start to blend into one another in what feels like endless repetition, broken up by ‘sleeps’ rather than by any discernable structure. It’s difficult to tell sometimes if you’re sleeping too much or not enough.

“Mom. I cleaned my room. I cleaned my room. Come see.”

The kid climbs up onto a kitchen counter and struggles to reach a cereal box on a high shelf, slipping. He picks up all the toys on the floor and makes his bed, hoping to coax his mom into making an appearance. Lego bricks and abandoned drawings soon litter the floor again as the kid drifts unsupervised from one activity to another, trying to keep himself occupied.

You struggle so much with meal-planning and cooking most days that you start relying heavily on snacks and food that requires little to no prep work. You're trying to look after yourself and your surroundings as best you can, to create the ideal conditions for the rational adult to reemerge, but you’re still left perpetually waiting. You can’t focus on any one thing for too long, and you seem to just immediately mess things up again after tidying.

“I’m colouring on the carpet… I hate you.”

Sleeps stop following on consecutively at this point and begin to pass by in bigger and bigger jumps. The house is visibly in more disarray than before, with toys scattered everywhere. After 49 sleeps, the kid resorts to angrily scribbling on the carpet with marker pens in a frantic attempt to provoke a response from his mom. Outside her closed bedroom door, he whimpers that he hates her.

No matter how hard you try to set yourself up for a good, productive day, the rational adult never shows up. You keep pushing yourself because how can things still be this difficult when you’re trying so hard, and this only triggers a meltdown. You self-destruct on purpose sometimes, overworking yourself or allowing yourself to spiral, out of sheer frustration or to try to force the rational adult to take the wheel again.

“Mom? It's all quiet now. Mom. I'm… I'm sorry I got cancer. I'm better now though.”

56 sleeps later and still alone, the kid’s voice occasionally begins to take on a raspy, warped quality, sometimes still sounding like himself but at other times becoming unintelligible. As still shots of the darkened interior flicker by, he hums “You Are My Sunshine” to himself, attempting to self-soothe.

You feel constant anger, frustration, and disappointment with yourself, constant guilt for existing with a brain that simply refuses to work like it's supposed to, with mental illnesses that keep eating away at you day after day. With no rational adult there to comfort you, you try to comfort yourself, to convince yourself that things are getting better, that you are going to get better. Sometimes, for a little while, you almost believe it.

“Hello? Mom.”

Heck’s only real jumpscare occurs after 56 sleeps. The kid enters his mother’s bedroom and finds her lying on top of her bed, facing away from him. As she turns over and sits up in bed, she is only visible from the shoulders down. Suddenly, the camera abruptly shifts up, revealing her face. There is only a smooth blank space where her mouth should be, and she seems to stare straight through her son.

You know logically that you still occupy the same space as the rational adult, that they must still be inside your head somewhere. It’s just that they either can’t or won’t respond to you anymore. They seem to be voiceless, disconnected from you. Maybe just as powerless as you are.

“Mommy. I think we’re in hell.”

From ‘314 sleeps’ onward, the word ‘later’ is left out of the intertitles. Time no longer has any logical flow, and nothing appears to be happening earlier or later than anything else. Aside from strange whimpering and banging sounds and the blaring TV, there is no more dialogue until the film ends abruptly with the delivery of the above line, as a door slowly opens to blackness. After 18,694 sleeps, the child’s voice is now an unnaturally distorted whine, warped beyond all recognition.

The longer you remain trapped inside your head the way you are, the more it feels like it’s transforming you for the worse. Like scar tissue building up on your brain. You fear the time you’ve lost to it. You're scared that it's irreparable. You're becoming less and less functional and you start to feel less and less human because of it.

Rewatching Heck and searching for meaning in the mundane, for narrative clues in lingering, grainy shots of dimly lit rooms and closed doors, was challenging, but I was eventually able to glean something from it that I couldn't the first time around. I’m still not sure if I would recommend Heck, or who I would recommend it to. One comment left on the video simply states, ‘Complex PTSD from severe neglect. If it's in you, this movie is terrifying. If it isn't, it's watching paint dry.’