Warning- this review contains spoilers.

Ms 45 first came onto my radar due to it’s inclusion in the fantastic horror compilation film, Terror In The Aisles. It would be years before I could actually see the film from start to finish, courtesy of a one-off rare film screening at a cinema in Hampstead when I was living in London and studying film. All I can say is that it was worth the wait.

One important note- if this piece inspires you to check the film out, please find the UNCUT version rather than the neutered version that’s on YouTube. Just type into Google ‘Ms.45 Uncut’ and you’ll find it online to watch. The uncensored version is a masterpiece, the cut version an abomination.

Thana is a mute seamstress in the Garment District of early 80’s Noo Yawk. One day when walking home from work, she is violently raped (the director Abel Ferrera starring in a ghoulish cameo resplendent with a garish painted plastic mask). On actually making it home after this traumatic event, Thana discovers that her apartment has been broken into and the burglar is still in the residence. She is raped again but this time, she fights back and kills her attacker. She dismembers her rapist’s body and stores his body parts in her refrigerator. She then becomes a one-woman vigilante, getting into situations in which she puts herself at risk of potential rape and gaining vengeance via her .45.

I love Thana’s transformation from victim to badass and becoming a black angel of death. There’s something very satisfying and aesthetically pleasing about her fighting back, taking control and serving justice in the scenarios she willfully places herself in. This transformation from victim to judge, jury and executioner feels massively empowering and liberating.

Ms.45 also has a dark sense of gallows humour at its heart also. Note the man who was chasing after Thana to return her bag but instead receives a bullet between the eyes for his trouble. There are also the sequences running through the film of Thana depositing the various black bin liners containing her attacker’s many body parts in multiple ways. I love the sequence in which a man is seen packing the trunk of his car seemingly for a weekend away but when his back is turned, Thana drops in one of the binliners also. The sequence in which she grinds up some of the meat from one of these body parts for a snack for her eccentric landlady’s pest of a dog is priceless.

Zoe Lund’s performance as the mute Thana is revelatory. Notice the scene in which she is raped for a second time and the awful build-up to the event. Lund’s performance fully expresses her vulnerability, humanity and then her transition from victim to aggressor amazingly. Her metamorphosis into the black-clad justice machine is also fantastic. She kicks ass in her new guise. This new persona also inspired what in my opinion may be possibly my favourite film poster of all time- Thana’s legs resplendent with seductive stockings and a hidden .45 whilst a man in the distance wielding a plank of wood can be seen through them.

Later on in the film, it would appear that Thana’s sense of justice transforms from righteous justice to sheer misandry with her seemingly taking aim at all men. We see her chasing after a young man whose crime is merely making out on the street with his girlfriend. Thankfully, she doesn’t gain access to him as he enters an apartment building that she finds herself locked out of.

The finale involves Thana attending her work’s Halloween costume party as a very seductive nun. She starts to fire her gun indiscriminately and commences to seemingly kill every man in attendance. She is stabbed in the back with a knife by her female friend and utters the only word we hear her speak throughout the film’s running time- ‘sister’. Is Ms 45 director Abel Ferrera’s critique of the feminism of the day?

The soundtrack of Ms 45 is just as shocking as the action we see on the screen. It appears to be an unholy and brilliant juxtaposition of punk, No Wave and the dark analogue synth swirls we heard in his earlier film Driller Killer. The use of the saxophone throughout the film sounds like discordant distress calls or shrieks and really are something to behold. At the start of Driller Killer, there is the title card to ‘Play this film loud’. This is just as applicable here.

Ms 45 is a great New York movie, a time capsule to when The Big Apple was rotten to the core with crime at an all-time high and when residents took their own lives in their hands whether they left their apartments or stayed home.

Ms 45 has been painstakingly restored for a Blu-Ray release but I feel it still remains painfully underrated and really is a hidden gem from an uncompromising and brilliant film director.