Written and directed by Deborah Kampmeier
Starring Isabelle Fuhrman, Isabella Pisacane and Tarek Bishara
Running time: 1 hour and 38 minutes

by Matthew Crump

Tape is a film that needs to be seen so women will finally be believed. With a budget that’s small, and a genre that’s indie, don’t expect a #metoo exposé of Hollywood blockbuster proportions. What you should expect is creative, complex female narratives that make an honest effort to empower women.

The film follows two young, aspiring actresses, one of which is quite literally following the other. What initially reads as a stalker plot, however, eventually develops into something much darker and complex. Rosa (Annarosa Mudd) opens the film standing in front of her bathroom mirror self-inflicting multiple body modifications before heading out to an audition clad in hidden body cams. Once she arrives at the audition, it’s clear she’s not there for the part, she’s there to meet and film Pearl (Isabelle Fuhrman).

The majority of the rest of the film is a combination of the found footage collected from Rosa’s various planted cameras and the omnipresent narrative camera. These two onlooker perspectives work together to give us Pearl’s experience with an ingratiating, quietly perturbing movie producer named Lux (Tarek Bishara). While Pearl’s attempt at career advancement gradually becomes more manipulative, Rosa watches on an iPad on the other side of the wall of a warehouse made up into a makeshift movie studio. This warehouse is where the bulk of the film takes place, with a 45 minute sequence that feels almost as inescapable to the viewer as Pearl’s impossible dilemma.

This is where the vast majority of Tape’s power lies. While designating 45 minutes to one sequence is a risk for any film, the choice was clearly one that was not only calculated, but necessary to discomfort the viewer into truly understanding Pearl’s perspective and the nature of the industry and man that manifested it. The main plot line feels so real simply because it was real.

With Tape being her acting debut, producer and star, Annarosa Mudd offered her personal experience with being exploited to serve as the film’s main plot. The parallel plot of the other actress secretly taping the main events in an attempt to expose her abuser was a role concocted by writer and director Deborah Kampeier. This is the role of Rosa that Mudd would ultimately play, with Isabelle Fuhrman portraying Mudd’s direct experience as Pearl. Mudd described seeing Fuhrman act out her lived experience as “mind-blowing,” saying, “As I watched her, I saw a story, a smart person trying to work her way through something. Seeing it that way helped me to stop berating myself, stop seeing myself as gullible, stupid, an easy mark.”

Having explored the topic of sexual violence agaisnt women in the last three features she’s directed, this is by no means Kampmeier’s first time grappling with such heavy source material. While Tape is Kampmeier’s first feature to release in the path of the Time’s Up Movement, the project actually started about two years before in 2016.

The value of female perspective and voice in this film is vast. The women both behind and in front of the camera challenge all viewers' pre-existing understandings of power structures and answer the question that has been on everyone’s lips in recent years, “How do men get away with this?” The main narrative of Tape dares to explore the grey area that so many sexual assault cases fall into while being careful not to excuse the abuser’s actions or undermine the woman’s reactions. Unfortunately, our other protagonist is not nearly as considerate in the grey area of her plot line.

While Mudd’s debut performance as Rosa is certainly a powerful one, the character herself reads more as a misguided anti-hero than the feminist vigilante she is paraded as. The way Rosa responds to her trauma teeters on a fantastical edge that ultimately leads to her engaging in the worst-case scenario definition of a bystander. Not only does she let Pearl be fed into the exact same scenario she was subjected to, she literally watches it happen on multiple different camera feeds. This adds another layer to the violation of Pearl’s consent that casts too much doubt into Rosa’s good intentions. Of course she wants revenge on her abuser, but at what cost?

To some extent, this type of complex character building takes a lot of skill to write and convey. For this, Kampemeier and especially Mudd should be commended. However, the ambiguous moral compass of the film’s personified fly-on-the-wall is undermined in a final scene that conveniently excuses her of all the intricacies of her behavior. For a film that was so unafraid to challenge its viewers with a slow-burn exposé of the entertainment industry, the final sequence was a muddy blur of action and resolution that sabotages the female character’s stories.

Available on demand April 10th.