At best, Wiebke von Carolsfeld’s Someone’s Daughter can be described as well-intentioned. Critically, however, it is existentially foolhardy and morally naive. Carrying a juvenile sort of feminism, running laps chasing the optimistic high of girlboss feminism, the film feels as though it was conceived in a writing workshop in the ‘90s.
The story, written by Carolsfeld and Doug Taylor, is essentially a thought experiment. What would happen if a lawyer were stranded in the wilderness with the man she successfully defended against rape charges 15 years ago? Pascale Bussières plays Sam, the defense lawyer, and François Arnaud is Paul, her erstwhile client. Both are kidnapped by Mr. Borden (Peter Outerbridge), the father of Lydia, the woman who brought rape charges against Paul. We learn in the first few moments of the film that Lydia’s life fell apart after the trial, and she died two years prior of a fentanyl overdose. The angry and grieving Mr. Borden, resenting himself for letting his daughter be further victimized by the legal system, wants to teach Sam a lesson, so he kidnaps her and leaves her stranded in the remote wilderness with Paul. He wants Sam to learn the “truth.” The rest of the film follows Sam and Paul’s attempts to survive and return to civilization.
A defense lawyer’s job, for the most part, is not to proffer objective truth, but to build an argument that acquits her client. Will seeing the once-accused Paul outside of the confines of the justice system, when it is no longer her job to save his life, prod Sam toward some kind of existential reckoning? That’s what this film asks, not realizing that this question is beside the point. As Sam learns that Paul carries in him the strength to inflict violence on women, she also realizes that she might have facilitated the freedom of a bad man.
Someone’s Daughter doesn’t seem to realize that defending guilty people is part and parcel of a defense lawyer’s job. Instead of taking the entirety of our justice system to task, instead of interrogating the system that allows and even encourages the dehumanization of victims of sexual assault and violence, it places the burden of responsibility on a single woman, turning her realization of her culpability into the point of catharsis. Sam becomes the single blameworthy locus for the injustice depicted in this film, as though she were the judge in Paul’s case. It all feels like an exercise in strawmanning at best, and misogyny at worst.
Further, it feels a cruelty that Sam is a woman who needs to be “taught” this lesson by Mr. Borden. Most women understand viscerally the power men wield, the potential that lies in someone like Paul to hurt women, and would not need such a vulgar form of teaching to be convinced that that Paul could have raped a woman. It’s strange that this film doesn’t entertain the complex reality of many defense lawyers. Sam would have defended Paul even if she felt him to be guilty — this is how the legal system works, people defend people even if they know they are bad. This feels a cruelty because the film believes Sam to be that stupid, to be that naive. One gets the sense that Sam was written as genderless, and just perfunctorily embodied by a woman actor, because women can be lawyers, too.
One might hold great apprehension about this film from its title alone, and nothing in its execution is accomplished in the way of assuaging that caution. It is a dated thing to do, to convince the public to care for victims of rape because “they could have been your sister or daughter”; one shouldn’t care about a person because of their relation to oneself, but rather because a person is a person. This kind of thinking, saying Lydia was “someone’s daughter,” decenters Lydia in the dialogue about the violence done to her and centers others, centers men. This kind of thinking doesn’t believe women so much as it first and foremost considers the feelings of those nearmost to the victim. Lydia’s is just a name in this film. She remains a perennial victim, first of Paul’s, then of mental illness, and then of death. Her story isn’t related or valued at all, and it’s Sam’s feelings that are instead pedastaled, while Paul is endlessly humanized. Lydia is flat, not a person in herself deserving of respect, but just “someone’s daughter.”
Von Carolsfeld’s film is a bold step in the wrong direction. It feels as though it were made for men who don’t believe women to begin with, a lofty thought experiment for them to consider from a place of safety. Someone’s Daughter doesn’t add anything to the conversation about victims of sexual assault navigating the judicial system, but rather distracts from them. Only superficially feminist, this film takes great and disappointing pains to get us to thinking about ourselves, not others.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2026 — Dispatch 2.
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