“Sometimes I think that she reads my mind and that she can’t be alone anywhere. But it doesn’t hurt me.” Anna Kendrick is Alice, a young and attractive New Yorker who maintains an ideal relationship with Simon, an emerging artist. But things don’t work as they should. Simon controls Alice’s life, he decides what the girl has to eat, she always takes the initiative in sex and she doesn’t like her friends. So when Sophie invites Alice to spend a few days at her lake house to celebrate Tess’s birthday, Alice lies to her boyfriend that she has to be away on business.
Reunited with her friends, Alice gradually discovers that she is the victim of “psychological abuse, which in the UK is also known as coercive control. It is relatively new that these situations are recognized as abuse, because as in the film, it is not necessarily violent or physical and, nevertheless, it can lead to the total control of the affected person”, explains in an interview with La Vanguardia Mary Nighy, director of Alice, darling, which today hits Spanish screens.
The consequences of this type of abuse can be disastrous, because “victims can end up being controlled by the abuser in the economic and emotional sphere and it is common for them to lose their friends and even distance themselves from their family,” adds the director. . In addition, psychological abuse is not as easy to detect as physical abuse, “because it usually starts in a very subtle way, builds little by little and can turn into a gaslight so that the person affected ends up not distinguishing what it is and what it is.” what is not true,” he adds.
In the case posed by Alice, darling, the abuser is a man and the victim is his girlfriend, but “this is not always the case, because although psychological abuse affects many women, some men also suffer it and it is a phenomenon that appears in heterosexual relationships, but it also happens in homosexual relationships”, points out Nighy, who after taking her first steps as an actress in films like Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006) or Tormented (Jon Wright, 2009) is now making her debut as a director with this film.
How can someone defend themselves against this type of abuse? “It is something that can happen to anyone, to overcome it the first thing is recognition, being able to understand what is happening and realizing that even if there is no violence, there is abuse and that has a strong emotional impact. Alice , for example, suffers from a hair-pulling disorder called trichotillomania, a syndrome that is not always accompanied by abuse, but does affect people under extreme stress. he experiences self-destruction. During filming, a lot of people told me they had trichotillomania, I didn’t know it was so common.”
Nighy has garnered rave reviews for this feature debut, “thanks in no small part to the work of Anna Kendrick, who is a very intelligent actress.” Now, she is going to continue her career behind the camera: “I no longer consider myself an actress,” she says, explaining that she came to directing when she worked with Sophia Coppola in Marie Antoinette, because “she was smart and calm and she made me see that a woman could lead without needing to emulate the classic authoritarian man”.
The director has also learned a lot from her parents, the famous British actors Bill Nighy and Diana Quick, because they “instilled in her a love of stories, hard work and doing things with other people,” concludes Nighy from the United States where He is shooting his new movie.