Review: Angels Wear White, 2017, dir. Vivian Qu

We turn to movies, more often than not, for escape and distraction, for the promise of having our woes assuaged, if only for a couple of hours, in the calming glow of the silver screen (whether in large or small formats). Occasionally, though, the movies deny us, as in Angels Wear White, the new film by Vivian Qu, which recently screened at the BFI London Film Festival, and which assuredly does not assuage a single goddamn woe, because that would defeat the point. 

I’ve been tearing through movies of late that each in their own way reflect the moment we’re in vis-à-vis Harvey Weinstein and Bob Weinstein and Roy Price and oh my, does the list go on; Angels Wear White is one of those, perhaps the best of those, and even if it is not directly about men with the kind of power these guys wield, it’s tangentially about them because it’s about power structures in society that allow sexual abuse to go unpunished.

I wrote about that, and Qu’s excellent filmmaking, over at The Playlist.