Judy & Punch: Fearlessly Dark Fable Powered by Puppets, Performance… and Fearsome Payback
By Kim Hughes
Rating: A-
Semi-comic tales don’t come blacker or more twisted than writer/director Mirrah Foulkes’ quietly electrifying Judy & Punch, which might be subtitled “When Scumbags Get Bigtime Comeuppance.”
A female-driven revenge story based to great visual effect in the Middle Ages and loosely structured around the famous marionette shows that began in Italy and migrated with great fanfare to England, Judy & Punch takes every opportunity to upend expectations, and then some.
As the film opens, we meet the titular couple about to perform a puppet show for the great unwashed in their ironically named, landlocked village of Seaside. Judy (Mia Wasikowska) is the “bottler” who tees up the show, then assists the “punchman” (Damon Herriman, Charles Manson in both Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood) behind the curtain before passing the hat. We are led to this scene by a child who serves as a lynchpin-slash-narrative tour guide throughout the rest of the film.
The wildly slapstick show is a smash and our heroes bask in the positive blowback, but it soon becomes clear that despite the fanfare surrounding Punch, Judy is the brains of the operation. Indeed, Punch is a drunk, and a mean one and, in short order, a baby meets a bad fate and a beating most foul is committed. (No spoilers here, this is all in the trailer).
Read our interview with Judy & Punch’s Director and Co-Star
Luckily for Judy, Punch cannot even get murder right without her. Judy is saved and, among a tribe of banished women living on the outskirts of town, she heals, finds an ad hoc family more powerful than the one she was torn from… and slowly plots her revenge.
Meanwhile, despite his efforts to save how own skin and advance his career, things unravel for nasty old Punch, who frames an old couple for his crimes, plays the town and its caretakers for fools, ensnares a highly unfortunate new girlfriend and her children in his routine, and systematically dismantles the reputation his benevolent onetime sidekick helped cement. Then things really go south.
There is much to like about Judy & Punch, from eye-popping costumes to its grim humour, its peculiar incidental music to its enchanting set pieces (and winkingly modern touches) that neatly convey the joys rowdy marionettes brought to a hard-scrabble 16th century population ankle-deep in barnyard shit and poverty. The film is dark, as if candlelit like many of its interiors, and its claustrophobia is palpable, further conveying the cloistered aspect of its setting.
There is also a queasy facet to the film and not just in a gore sense, though there is some of that. It’s carried more in the horrors people inflict on each other, not-so-subtly underlined here by the fact that the good people mostly come off as naïve whereas Punch and others in his evil orbit scan as clever if devious.
Still, Wasikowska and Herriman are great; she the stoic wife utterly transformed by a heinous act, he the narcissist with scarce redemptive qualities. Both make Judy & Punch’s gut-punch ending ever so satisfying, even as your head spins at writer/director Foulkes’ fearless descent into dark territory rarely — but very, very persuasively — explored by women.
Judy & Punch. Written and directed Mirrah Foulkes. Starring Mia Wasikowska and Damon Herriman. Available June 5 on EST and VOD.