Film review: Jailbait is gritty
The Asylum is renowned for bringing films with a certain b-movie aesthetic to your screens. Remember Sharknado? Well, they were responsible for that. In 2014 they’re offering the likes of brilliantly-titled Mega Shark vs Mecha Shark and the less imaginatively-named Sharknado 2. However, it is their latest release, Jailbait, that caught our eye, namely because Something You Said’s friend and contributor, Sara Malakul Lane, is at its centre.
Directed by Jared Cohn (another Something You Said interviewee, by the way), Jailbait tells the story of Anna Nix, who is incarcerated for killing her step-father. A shy, cello-playing girl who accidentally committed the crime while trying to protect herself from being sexually assaulted, Nix (played by Sara Malakul Lane) is not the kind of person who will easily survive within a jail environment. Yet this is the world into which she is thrown, as the narrative focuses on her descent into a dark, tough and complex life of violence, relationships, drugs and mental illness.
While the action supposedly takes place within a juvenile prison (an alternate title is 17 & Life: Jailbait), the actresses playing the inmates within this facility are very much women, which is understandable given the film’s sexploitation aesthetic. This is dark subject matter littered with rape and violence.
And this is why Sara Malakul Lane’s performance is especially noteworthy/praiseworthy. To call it a challenging role is an understatement. She is very naked very often, yet, almost without exception, her nudity is involuntary in the extreme. She is raped, beaten in the showers, coerced into lesbian sex, strip-searched and forced naked into solitary confinement where she scrabbles around for scraps of food like an animal. While she has a (pun alert) killer body, the scenes in which she bares her skin are, for the most part, uncomfortable to watch. These aren’t soft-focus love-scenes, but gritty to the point of making the audience feel voyeuristic. Her nakedness illustrates her vulnerability.
And when she’s clothed, things aren’t much better for her. When she’s not fighting, she’s smoking crack. It’s a hard-knock life and she plays it very well. While each scene is almost self-contained and pretty much interchangeable – fight scene followed by drugs scene followed by sex(ual assault) scene etc, Sara Malakul Lane’s character does follow an interesting arc. She goes from clueless, scared, fresh meat to tough cookie, through drug abuse, into her darkest cave and out again to some kind of redemption and, in doing so, she portrays each emotion with believability. Amongst the unapologetic sexploitation vibe – buxom inmates, caricatured evil prison warden and so on – it would have been easy for the audience not to care too much about the plight of Anna Nix. So it’s a real achievement for Sara Malakul Lane that you genuinely want her to find light at the end of a very dark tunnel.
Amongst the boobs, the sex, the bitch fights, the drug taking and the slightly too-nicely-tied-up ending, director Jared Cohn and his beau Sara Malakul Lane have worked together to portray a very interesting character in Anna Nix; a normal girl in extraordinary circumstances who is falling apart and forced to tear at the seams of her morals and her sanity to survive. Props to Cohn for sticking to his vision despite it presumably meaning he had to put his real-life partner through some stressful days of shooting in the process, and credit indeed to Sara Malakul Lane for her really brave performance in a tough, gruelling role.
Jailbait is available now on home video formats.
Read Sara’s behind-the-scenes piece about Jailbait here and check out our interview here.
Review by Bobby Townsend
