Parents' Guide to Qorin

Solid performances elevate the slapdash horror in this not-very-scary meditation on sexual violence and abuse. The blood, violence, and peril in Qorin are all quite tame, but the issues the film explores and confronts are certainly less so. Unfortunately, the juxtaposition between sexual violence and women's demonic doubles could've worked better and been explored more deeply. But because the film didn't choose this course, it ends up presenting the uncomfortable "inevitability" of women "going crazy" because of the sexual violence done to them without exploring more critically how representing trauma in this way might say something deeper or more intelligently about abuse of power, psychological trauma, or sexuality in a religious context generally. The film risks trivializing sexual violence and abuse to surrealistic or outrageous manias. In other words, the film at the surface level draws a metaphor between sexual violence and abuse of power in a religious setting and the trauma and "insanity" that follow the women who have been abused, but it doesn't follow through on the metaphor. Therefore, the viewer is left with the gross suggestion that sexual violence is merely caused by an "otherworldly" demonic force rather than by actual human beings, or actual men, in this case.

Lastly, the film ends so abruptly that the viewer gets absolutely no closure or sense of what happens afterward. There is no sense of how the main characters healed, worked to make the school better, or found good lives again after such traumatic events.