There are truly not a lot of things that irritate me more than misogyny masquerading as feminism. It’s honestly an outrage to see films like Menopause in 2021. It makes me wonder if we’ve actually come as far as we think we have. Menopause confuses misandry with feminism – and gives feminists and women in general a bad name.

In Menopause, we are introduced to various unhappy couples or ex-couples. None of these couples seem to really like each other, with the exception of one. They’re all the usual suspects – the workaholic husband with the neglected wife, the ex-husband with the new young girlfriend, etc. For fun, we also get a peek inside a battered women’s home, full of painful stereotypes from the horribly regressed “never dated much” older woman to the butch, angry man-hater. This film is filled with caricatures on steroids. One of these caricatures informs us that a solar eclipse is coming – and informs us that (spoiler alert) women’s menstrual cycles are linked to the moon. Exposition much? Little by little all of these women realize they are late – and they have a sudden thirst for man-blood.

Oy. How do I even unpack anything I just said? Well, to start, if this was a fun, raunchy comedy it would be passable. Instead, too many bizarre lines are crossed – the alcoholic who hates her boyfriend with cancer, for example. The cast doesn’t pull through performances that make the material easier to ignore. In fact, more than half of them are downright bad. The likeability is minimal – and sometimes it’s easier to like the men than the women, which feeds into the bizarre misogyny. Women are portrayed as really only ever being a drain on their husbands – and notice there’s absolutely zero queer representation mentioned anywhere in this review – because there is none in the movie. Women who hate their husbands and men who resent their wives – what fun.

Expositional vignettes substitute what could be a thorough and thoughtful script… and in case you couldn’t tell, the script isn’t too thoughtful. If I had to find redemption in this mess, there are some particularly gruesome kills – although, there are some that are equally badly done, and it’s clear budget and crew had to be saved for certain gags, versus others.

Menopause is erratic, irregular, and downright shameful.

2 out of 10