Parliament Girls (2024)
★★ — Parliament Girls (2024)
There's a moment early in Parliament Girls where the stakes of the story become clear, and honestly, my feelings about the film pulled in two directions from that point and never quite settled. This is a short from St Vincent and the Grenadines, a country that doesn't exactly have a packed filmography to its name, and the film knows it has something urgent to say. Whether it says it well enough is a different question.
The film opens with Shandy, our lead, sitting down to dinner and making plans to head out for the evening. Her mother is worried, and that worry feels loaded with personal history, the suggestion being that she's been on the wrong end of violence herself at some earlier point in her life. It's a quietly effective setup. The film hangs a grim statistic over everything: something in the region of one in forty percent of women across the Caribbean will experience violence from a partner. That's a number that should stop you in your tracks, and to the filmmakers' credit, they clearly want it to.
From there, Parliament Girls goes down the road of vigilantism. Women taking matters into their own hands, arming up, hitting the streets, confronting suspected wrongdoers directly. And here's where my discomfort really kicked in. I completely understand the rage behind that impulse. When institutions fail people, when violence goes unchecked and unpunished, the fantasy of direct action is an entirely human response. I get it. But as a message to put out into the world, especially aimed at an audience of women who may genuinely be in dangerous situations, I found myself worried about the real-world implications. Encouraging people to physically confront suspected abusers, weapon in hand, based on suspicion rather than certainty, is a message that could get someone seriously hurt. The road to a bad outcome is paved with exactly the kind of passionate, well-intentioned thinking this film is full of.
That tension between respecting the impulse and questioning the message is where I spent most of my time watching this. It reminded me a little of how I felt watching Mustang, a film that also centres women pushing back against systems designed to constrain and harm them, though that one handles the complexity with considerably more craft.
And craft is where Parliament Girls struggles. There's genuine heart here, and given the limited filmmaking infrastructure of St Vincent and the Grenadines, it would be churlish not to acknowledge that putting something like this together is no small feat. The passion behind the camera is real, and the subject matter absolutely deserves a film made about it. But execution-wise, it's rough. The storytelling doesn't fully earn its vigilante conclusion, the characters don't get enough room to breathe and feel three-dimensional, and the film moves through its ideas a little too quickly to let any of them land with the force they deserve.
Two stars from me. It's a film I respect more than I enjoyed, made by people who clearly care about what they're saying. I just wish the saying of it had been sharper, and I wish the central message gave me less to worry about.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2025-08-28
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