Charlie Says

Many sentences begin with the words “Charlie says” for the incarcerated members of the Manson family Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel and Susan Atkins: in 1969 they committed the notorious Tate-LaBianca killings that turned a hippie dream into a “summer of hate”. A student tries to ground the women who are still entirely enraptured by Manson in reality and thereby brings back memories of an abysmal past. Mary Harron’s sect film Charlie Says shows an almost exclusively female perspective of what happened at the Spahn ranch, while the former Dr. Who Matt Smith makes for a terribly enigmatic Charles Manson, all of whose pores are – with today’s perception – dripping with toxic masculinity.