Fictional Movies with Domestic Violence Themes - Movie Review Example

Fictional Movies With Domestic Violence Themes For this particular paper, I decided to view the movie “If Someone Had Known”, a little known 1995 TVmovie that dealt with the theme of domestic abuse in two forms. Two women in the story, Ellen Liner, is the mother of Katie Liner. Both women are married and suffer two different types of domestic violence at the hands of their husbands. Ellen, suffers from the verbal abuse of her husband, Jack, who is a homicide detective. Katie on the other hand, suffers from both emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her husband Jimmy Pettit.

While Ellen confronts her husband towards the end of the movie with the reality of his abusive ways, her daughter Katie, has to defend herself in the court of law after accidentally killing her husband by shooting him. While Jack apologizes to Ellen and changes his ways, Katie is found not guilty in the end due to the documented abuse that she suffered at the hands of her husband and both women finally have a chance to start their lives anew. One of the scenes in the movie that caught my attention early on was the scene where Jimmy climbed into Katies bedroom window to have sex with her for the first time.

The most memorable dialogue from that scene can be summed up in one word from Katie, “No.”. After she refused his advances he lightly slapped her across the face in order to force her into submission, which she did. The second scene that caught my eye was the family confrontation later in the movie where Jack begins to berate his wife in front of Katie and she tells her father, “You are just like Jimmy!” for the way that her father was treating her mother. This launched the movie into a side by side comparison of emotional and physical abuse, ending with Katie declaring to her father that neither type of abuse is different from the other.

Our class reading from the book “Gendered Justice: Intimate Partner Violence and the Criminal Justice System & Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men “ directly relates to the movie that I viewed in the sense that the movie clearly depicts the need for a certain type of man to be in complete control of a women in order to assert himself as the leader of his pack. The book helped me understand what the movie was trying to explain about the controlling type of man and what makes him the most dangerous kind of husband.

In the end, this kind of man, the controlling and angry man loses control of himself and is unable to function in the dual personality that he has created for himself. Eventually, the angry and controlling personality will surface and take control of the man leaving him in a seriously mentally unstable state that can lead to worse case scenarios later on for that particular person. Works CitedIf Someone Had Known. Dir. Eric Laneuville. Perf. Kellie Martin, Kevin Dobson, Linda Kelsey, Ivan Sergei.

Landsburg Company, 1995. DVD.