Native American women go missing, are sexually assaulted, or are murdered at an average of ten times that of the non-native population. These crimes are predominantly carried out by non-native criminals. Reasons for these staggeringly high rates range from a lack of institutional concern, indifferent law enforcement policies regarding missing young women, and the multitude of jurisdictional cracks between Federal and Tribal lands. All point to an overall lack of care and concern for the most marginalized within these communities, with about a third of these victims being under 18 years of age. And yet the statistic persists.
Catch the Fair One, a grim revenge thriller written and directed by Spike Lee Fellowship Award recipient Josef Wladyka, centers the beef around the exploitation of young Native women as champion boxer Kayleigh gets herself sex trafficked to find her abducted sister. Bleak to an uncompromising degree, Wladyka, whose previous directorial efforts included his feature film debut Manos Sucias (“Dirty Hands”) as well as episodes of Narcos, The Terror, and Fear the Walking Dead, creates a doom-stricken world, the kind of uncomfortably rough place where crumbled poster boards tacked to telephone poles read “The fear of god is the beginning of wisdom” while nearby young women are traded, injected with heroin, and sold with the informality of swapped playing cards.
Imbued with a hard wrought toughness by real life super lightweight and middleweight class world champion Kali Reis (who is provided a story credit for the film), Kayleigh – better known as her professional moniker “KO” – has fallen to pieces in the two years since her younger sister went missing. Driven to find the men who took her captive, free her, and exact revenge, KO is a woman on a mission, one that will drive her to the darkest, seediest underbellies of the sex trade where no light dare peek in.
Viewers who like their revenge served iced cold, with litter glimmer of hope, accompanied by a colorless palette and humorless nerve, Catch the Fair One is as self-serious and dark an affair as you could ask for. From the casual, cruel moments depicting girls forcibly drugged while an indifferent, repulsive pimp photographs them and sets up their prostitute profiles to unsettling moments like a man being waterboarded to death in front of his wife and child, Wladyka’s film is a desolate experience and not one that’s enjoyable to watch or easy to recommend.
In the end, Wladyka’s story is about the cruelty of indifference. No one cares for the women who have gone missing. Not the police who are supposed to protect and serve them. Not the politicians sweeping the issue under the rug. Certainly not the traffickers who treat their victims as disposal waste. Their indifference leaves a chill over the film that while shining a light on a pertinent issue, in admitted B-movie exploitative fashion, is exhausting to a noticeable degree.
Executive produced by Darren Aronofsky, Catch the Fair One shows moments of promise but is undercut by the sheer volume of stomach-turning unpleasantness. The deadly serious nature of Wladyka’s work could have been more effective if the characters had more dimensionality but even with an impressive supporting cast that includes Kevin Dunn, Lisa Energy, Daniel Henshall and Michael Drayer, the oppressively unlikeable nature of these characters and their world ultimately make everyone and everything feel brutal and flat; thinly drawn and underwritten. And a film that’s built around various shades of the darkest black ends up resembling little more than a dark, unpleasant smear.
CONCLUSION: A vicious saga of exploitation and vengeance, ‘Catch the Fair One’ is a blood-splattered and grounded thriller that suffers from being oppressively bleak even as it directs focus towards an important and under-discussed topic.
C
For all of our Tribeca 2021 coverage, click here.
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By: Matt Oakes
Started blogging about film in college when the university paper wouldn’t have him. Dislikes your consensus film Twitter favorites. Devotee of horror movies that make him die a little inside. Catches films at festivals when he can. Proud SFCS and OFCS member and Tomatometer-approved critic. Editor-in-chief of Silver Screen Riot.
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