Amer (2009), directed by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, is a haunting exploration of female subjectivity told through Ana’s psychological development across three distinct life stages: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. With minimal dialogue and a heavily stylized visual language, the film delves into Ana’s conflicted relationship with sexuality, death, and desire, using psychoanalytic symbolism and dreamlike imagery.
In the childhood stage, Ana is introduced as a curious and frightened girl observing adult worlds from behind closed doors. The film opens with her watching her parents argue over Graziella, the dying grandfather’s mysterious caregiver, and mourning rituals that carry strong symbolic weight. Ana’s theft of a watch from her grandfather’s corpse and the subsequent strangulation attempt by gloved hands echoes a scene that recurs in her adulthood, symbolizing the return of the repressed. Her accidental witnessing of her parents’ violent sexual act (her father choking her mother as she experiences a mixture of pain and pleasure) marks a primal scene. The trauma is immediate and mirrored in the cinematography: Ana’s face appears in a mirror, invoking Lacan’s mirror stage, the moment of realizing herself as a separate being. This is further emphasized by the surreal sequence that follows — red light, water on the floor, wet sheets — representing her psychic birth from the womb and the encounter with adult sexuality.
The emotionally absent and controlling mother, who glares at Ana with rage upon waking, reflects an unresolved Oedipal conflict. The mother’s envy and hostility suggest that she sees Ana as a sexual rival for the father’s affection.
In adolescence, Ana is portrayed exploring her body on a cliff. As an ant crawls over her and she kills it, the moment becomes a symbolic interplay of Eros and Thanatos — the life and death drives, as Freud described. Sexual awakening is met with aggression and guilt. Her relationship with her mother intensifies: they walk together, and when an older man glances at Ana, the mother unbuttons her own dress but is dismayed when the attention remains on her daughter. This act reflects the mother’s competitiveness and fading youth.
At a hair salon, Ana fixates on her mother’s graying hair — a sign of aging and symbolic defeat. An old man at the salon forces a lollipop into Ana’s mouth, which is a phallic object. The scene represents sexual desire. This disturbing moment is mirrored by a young boy who appears to be Ana’s age. When their interaction leads them into a tunnel, the soundscape becomes overtly sexual. The tunnel, a classic symbol of intercourse in cinema, blurs the lines between innocence and perversion. Ana’s habitual chewing of her hair hints at an unresolved oral fixation, another pointer to her developmental arrest rooted in maternal issues.
Later, Ana encounters a group of bikers. From her gaze, the men appear to leer at her, though we only see fragmented shots of their bodies, emphasizing her desire to be the object of the gaze, to become the phallus. The power of her sexuality is quickly repressed again by a slap from her mother — shame and desire are always intertwined in Ana’s world.
In adulthood, Ana rides a crowded bus, pressed against strangers — an intense metaphor for how her sexuality now exists: always in contact, yet never intimate. When she enters a taxi, her fantasy of her dress ripping in the wind illustrates the thin boundary between reality and desire. The tension escalates when she returns to her childhood home, now abandoned, haunted, and hyper-sexualized in her imagination. A white fluid splattering on her hand when she hits a tree subtly suggests ejaculatory imagery, again tying arousal to shame and disruption.
Inside the house, Ana seems to be constantly watched — through paintings, statues, and the camera itself, which becomes voyeuristic. She touches the wall where wallpaper peels, mimicking female masturbation. She masturbates in the bathtub using the stolen comb — another phallic object — and as water fills the tub, it echoes the dreamlike primal scene from her childhood. Again, pleasure is interrupted: the gloved hands return to strangle her, blending orgasm and death in a powerful embodiment of Thanatos.
This cycle culminates in a surreal, violent climax. Ana is attacked, but it turns out she herself holds the gloves and the razor. The killer is Ana. She becomes the subject and the object, the violator and the violated. The death of the male figure is excessively symbolic: his Adam’s apple is destroyed, his mouth is cut — symbols of masculinity and the oral stage are dismantled. Ana penetrates the male body as if reaching for the jouissance Lacan speaks of — “not the satisfaction of a need, but the satisfaction of a drive.”
In the final sequence, Ana confronts a dark shadow on a cliff and kills it. Instead of blood, male ejaculation covers her face — a disturbing union of death and desire. Ana’s body lies in a morgue with wrist cuts: a final act of self-annihilation in pursuit of unreachable jouissance. The morgue attendant’s gentle arrangement of her body resembles an erotic act; her nipples and hair roots react.
She mirrors her mother in the primal scene she once witnessed. Then, she opens her eyes — reborn through death, consumed by desire, having momentarily touched the impossible.
In Amer, Ana’s fragmented journey through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood reveals how sexuality, trauma, and death are deeply intertwined. Through a psychoanalytic lens, the film portrays her desperate pursuit of desire, only to find it entangled with repression and destruction. Ultimately, Amer stands as a haunting exploration of the psyche’s dark, erotic depths.