Red, black, red, black, red, black…flashing neon lights reveal the dirty and tired New York City streets. A mute, delicate girl walks towards the moments that will change her forever. She couldn’t talk, but she made herself heard, using the same violent language she learned the hard way.
Gritty. Dark. Heartbreaking. Ms. 45 isn’t just a movie; it’s a cinematic gut punch—a raw scream from the grimy underbelly of 1980s New York, where innocence is a liability and vengeance is a prayer whispered in blood. Directed by Abel Ferrara, a man who grew up in the Bronx’s Catholic chaos, this 1981 exploitation thriller is an ode to broken angels and the demons they unleash.
Zoë Lund, with her gaunt face and ghostly eyes, plays Thana, a mute seamstress whose silence becomes her weapon. After enduring two brutal assaults in a single day, she transforms from prey into predator, stalking the city’s shadowy alleys with a .45 caliber pistol and a vendetta sharp enough to cut through the suffocating fog of misogyny. But Ms. 45 isn’t just a revenge story; it’s a reckoning. A raw, unflinching examination of trauma, societal complicity, and the thin, jagged line between victim and perpetrator.
Abel Ferrara: The Bronx Bard of Sin and Salvation
Ferrara, the man behind the lens, doesn’t just make films—he exhales them, ragged and feverish, soaked in the urban grit of his Bronx streets. Born into the unforgiving sprawl of asphalt and smoke, his Irish-Italian blood pumps thick through every frame, raw and unvarnished. His films are riddled with the symbols of his faith—nuns with haunted eyes, priests weighed down by secrets, crucifixes bent under the weight of a thousand whispered sins. It’s not devotion, not worship; it’s a wrestling match, bloody-knuckled, with the Catholicism he was raised in. The Bronx didn’t hand Ferrara salvation—it handed him rituals of guilt, a church full of ghosts, and an endless parade of confessions that never quite cleanse.
And the nuns—oh, the nuns. They don’t float in serene silence through his work; they stalk it, clad in black and white but never innocent. In Ms. 45, a mute seamstress dons the habit, her vengeance unholy, grotesque, and yet so righteous it burns. In Bad Lieutenant, it’s no better—the sacred is twisted, perverted into a carnival of despair, and the nuns are no longer women of grace but vessels of judgment, cold as marble. Ferrara’s Catholicism doesn’t heal; it flays. His stories peel back the layers of humanity, exposing the raw, ugly hunger beneath, that desperate reach for redemption that always slips through bloody fingers. He doesn’t show you a way out—he shows you a mirror, cracked and smeared, and dares you to look.
Thana: The Silent Fury
Lund’s Thana doesn’t float down like some holy redeemer; she crashes like a falling star, sharp-edged and burning. This mute seamstress—she doesn’t just lose her meekness, she strips it off and burns it like a cheap coat that never fit right. The silence that once painted her small, made her easy to miss, now grows like a shadow at dusk. It eats the room, the streets, the air. She doesn’t waste words—why would she, when the steel in her hand screams louder than any voice? Her pistol doesn’t argue or ask. It ends.
She picks her targets, and they’re always men. The kind you recognize—eyes that linger too long, hands that find places they don’t belong, mouths that spit poison wrapped in charm. Her silence answers their noise with gunfire, quick and mean. One shot. Two. Justice, if you can call it that, spilling out in red stains. There’s nothing clean about it, though. Justice here is a gutter where blood and filth mix, and you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
And there’s that scene—the one you can’t scrape out of your head. Thana, wrapped in something tight, black, shimmering like danger under a neon buzz. Her lips are painted a red so loud it hurts to look. She walks through the city like it owes her something and she’s here to collect. The shots come fast, each one cutting through the racket of the streets, a sharp punctuation against the droning hum of a world that’s done nothing but take. Every bullet is a scream, not hers, but one stolen from every woman told to sit down, shut up, and smile.
But then there’s the rub. She doesn’t stop. And as the bodies pile, you start to wonder if she’s just burning it all down for the sake of the fire. Hero? Villain? Those words start to feel like cheap labels slapped on a bottle of poison. The thing about Thana is, she isn’t saving the world. She’s ripping it open, piece by bloody piece. And when the dust settles, you’re left asking yourself who the real monster is—the men she kills, or the woman she’s become.
A Society That Preys on Women
The violence in Ms. 45 doesn’t sit neatly within the confines of fiction. It claws out from the screen, ugly and real, a mirror held up to the world we’ve built. In 2021, the World Health Organization reported that 1 in 3 women—736 million—have endured physical or sexual violence. Think about that. More than the population of the United States and Mexico combined. In the United States alone, someone is sexually assaulted every 68 seconds, according to RAINN. Sixty-eight seconds. Tick-tock. Another life upended, another wound opened. But what happens after the assault? Out of every 1,000 assaults, only 25 perpetrators will see the inside of a prison cell. That’s not justice. That’s a mockery of the very concept.
But it’s not just cinema we’re talking about. Ms. 45 doesn’t merely reflect trauma; it inhales it, exhales it, throws it back in our faces with blood-splattered teeth. Behind the reel-to-reel hum of its storytelling lies a raw nerve: the overwhelming reality of sexual violence and femicide, still as visceral today as it was when Ferrara prowled his camera through alleyways and fire escapes. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reports that globally, 47% of women killed in 2020 met their end at the hands of a partner or family member. Think about that: home, the supposed sanctuary, becoming the morgue.
Globally, the numbers are no less damning. A United Nations report from 2021 revealed that 47,000 women were killed by intimate partners or family members in a single year—an average of one woman murdered every 11 minutes. These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re a pattern, an epidemic etched into the daily lives of women around the world. In Mexico, the term “feminicidio” has become a rallying cry against the staggering number of women killed simply for being women—more than 10 murders a day, according to official reports. In South Africa, femicide rates are five times the global average. The epidemic stretches across borders, cultures, and languages, united in its brutality.
The silence surrounding these crimes is deafening. Consider the case of Sarah Everard in the UK, who was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by a police officer in 2021. The officer, tasked with protecting the public, used his badge to lure her into a false sense of safety. Her death sparked nationwide protests, highlighting the pervasive fear women live with every day. But even in the wake of her murder, women were told to "stay home" and "be careful," as if the burden of prevention lies with the victim, not the predator. The anger was palpable, but the system? It shrugged, as it always does.
In India, a 2020 report by the National Crime Records Bureau stated that nearly 90 women are raped every day. Many of these crimes go unreported, silenced by fear, shame, or societal pressure. When a young woman in Hathras was gang-raped and murdered, her body was cremated by authorities without her family’s consent, sparking outrage and protests across the nation. But outrage fades, doesn’t it? The system counts on that. The news moves on. The violence doesn’t.
The cultural script often blames women for their own victimization. Don’t walk alone at night. Don’t wear that. Don’t drink too much. The rules pile up, as if following them guarantees safety. But they don’t. Not when the violence comes from inside the house, from a trusted partner, from the very institutions meant to protect. The CDC reports that over half of female homicide victims in the United States are killed by a current or former intimate partner. That’s not random violence. That’s a calculated, intimate betrayal.
And what about the digital age? Social media has amplified both the visibility of these crimes and the abuse itself. Online harassment, threats, and stalking disproportionately target women. A Pew Research Center study found that 21% of women aged 18-29 have been sexually harassed online. The internet becomes another battlefield, a place where violence morphs into endless streams of hate-filled messages and explicit threats.
Thana’s transformation in Ms. 45 doesn’t feel so fictional when you consider these realities. It’s a reflection, a twisted echo of something stirring in the real world. Picture a society where women, wrung dry by endless apologies and failures, decide they’ve had enough. Where justice isn’t blind but simply absent, leaving fury as the only thing left to fill the void. A grim fantasy, maybe, but one that has roots, deep and tangled, in the soil of systemic rot. When the courts shrug, when the cops turn their backs, when every “No” is met with another wound, what’s left? What does that kind of frustration turn into?
Thana’s actions may be violent, even grotesque, but they aren’t incomprehensible. They’re a scream—a raw, guttural howl from the bottom of a collective rage that’s been simmering too long beneath the veneer of civility. You want to look away, but you can’t. It’s there, as real as the numbers, as real as the empty promises of a system that punishes the wrong people. Thana’s rage doesn’t come out of nowhere. It comes from the world she lives in. From the world we live in. And maybe that’s what’s most terrifying of all.
This isn’t just a problem for women. It’s a societal sickness, a rot that eats away at the very idea of safety, justice, and equality. The numbers, the stories, the silences—they form a pattern too loud to ignore. But the question remains: how much longer can we look the other way? How many more women have to scream before the system listens? Or will it take something more—a Thana, a breaking point, a reckoning—to force the world to finally confront the truth?
Exploitation or Empowerment?
Ferrara walks a tightrope in Ms. 45. Exploitation cinema has always risked commodifying trauma, turning agony into spectacle. But Ferrara’s film doesn’t feel like cheap voyeurism. It’s too raw, too jagged. Lund’s performance, both haunting and electric, pulls you into Thana’s fractured psyche. The violence isn’t glorified; it’s grim, uncomfortable, and deeply personal.
Yet, the film raises uncomfortable questions. Does it empower or exploit? Are we, as viewers, complicit in the cycle of violence by consuming it as entertainment? Ms. 45 doesn’t offer answers. Instead, it shoves a cracked mirror in our faces, forcing us to confront our own complicity. The film’s jagged morality isn’t a flaw; it’s a challenge.
A Howl of Rage and a Call to Action
More than 40 years after its release, Ms. 45 remains disturbingly relevant. Ferrara’s gritty aesthetic echoes through contemporary films like Promising Young Woman and The Nightingale. But while these narratives spark important conversations, they often fail to incite the systemic changes survivors need. It’s not enough to scream into the void. We need accountability, structural upheaval, and empathy.
As the credits roll on Ms. 45, the city remains unchanged. The monsters—the predators, the abusers—still roam the streets. And maybe that’s Ferrara’s point. The film isn’t about offering solutions; it’s about exposing the rot. It’s a reminder that the real horror isn’t on the screen—it’s out there, in the streets, in our homes, and sometimes, staring back at us in the mirror.
Abel Ferrara doesn’t give us a happy ending. He gives us a challenge. Will we dismantle the systems that perpetuate violence, or will we remain complicit, content to watch from the sidelines? The choice is ours. But until then, the rage that fuels Ms. 45 will remain—a jagged scream in a world too deaf to listen.
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