Why The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo Gives Hollywood a Feminist Alibi

Netflix’s adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel follows Evelyn Hugo as she reveals seven marriages, sexual coercion and a life rebuilt around wealth and control. Directed by Julie Robinson, the film arrives in Australia as glossy prestige entertainment, joining a local streaming market where Netflix competes with Stan, Disney+, Paramount+ and Foxtel’s Now. For many viewers, the ageing narrator promises a rare female portrait: sharp, sensual and candid about desire.

Its feminist promise is real but unstable. The film gives women language for abuse and lets an older woman seize control of her story. Yet it also turns structural misogyny into a polished confession, complete with colourful wives, memorable villains and a cathartic final reckoning. That combination can function as an alibi for entertainment, allowing us to admire the exposure while leaving the systems that produce abuse outside the frame.

The confession machine

Evelyn’s decision to dictate her life to a young reporter creates a compelling reversal of the male gaze: she controls the chronology, assigns blame and withholds information. The device also creates suspense around which husbands were monsters and which tales were self-serving. Her unreliability makes the film richer, because the alleged victim can be manipulative without becoming a symbol of false accusations.

The pleasure is confessional. Each marriage functions like a lurid reveal, allowing the audience to gasp at another concealed betrayal. That structure fits the Me Too appetite for first-person disclosure and acknowledges women’s survival knowledge, the stuff exchanged when a powerful man assumes he is the only one deciding what happened. But moral certainty is packaged for our consumption. Once Evelyn condemns the men, viewers can leave the film feeling informed without examining why their behaviour went unquestioned.

Bad men, harmless systems

Most of the film locates misogyny and toxic masculinity inside individual bodies. Abusive husbands are exposed, isolated and sometimes killed, while wealth, celebrity and institutional protection remain background scenery. The apparent lesson is that bad men must be punished. That lesson can satisfy a feminist demand for accountability while quietly preserving the conditions that made abuse possible.

Hugh Jackman’s casting makes that contradiction especially sharp for Australian viewers. He grew up in Sydney, developed his craft on the Australian stage and became a global star as Wolverine; here he plays Evelyn’s volatile seventh husband. The beloved franchise image and the threatening husband can coexist, reassuring viewers that a familiar screen presence is only performing menace. Star power gives the film both the fantasy of exposure and a shield around the actor delivering it.

Who gets to be a feminist heroine

Evelyn is compelling because she is ageing, ambitious, angry and economically powerful, qualities rarely bundled into one female protagonist. Still, her authority is exceptional rather than representative. Her money, thinness, whiteness and access to lawyers let her absorb harm and redesign a life, while the film gives far less space to women who lack those protections. It also measures older women’s desirability largely through the attention of men.

That narrowness matters in Australia, where imported American prestige drama competes for attention with Melbourne-shot global espionage series such as The Tourist, carried by Netflix’s Australian catalogue. The market is crowded with stories made under different industrial conditions and with different ideas of whose lives merit sustained attention. Presenting an affluent woman’s survival as universal risks turning structural inequality into personal glamour, especially when race, class and disability remain largely outside her narrative.

The pleasure of punishment

Spectacle supplies another layer of comfort. Elegant costumes, glossy parties, expensive locations and abrupt violence turn violence into an aesthetic event. We do not merely witness coercion; we consume it as high-fashion drama, then receive the satisfaction of seeing the offending man fall. The sequence of punishments can feel politically satisfying because it supplies visible consequences in a story where real accountability is often delayed, negotiated or denied.

The echoes of the Robert Durst case sharpen this appetite for turning privilege into entertainment. A wealthy, media-connected man associated with violence becomes raw material for a female-centred revenge fantasy, complete with rewritten names and a reassembled history. The result can illuminate the gendered fascination with powerful bad men. It can also reproduce the market’s appetite for access to their lives, as though women become compelling when they are authorised to reveal, judge and destroy them.

Accountability beyond the plot

Julie Robinson’s direction and Elle Harmon’s screenplay give the film a strong female creative centre, and Evelyn’s voice resists the idea that a woman must become respectable by sacrificing desire. Still, creative credentials cannot settle the larger question: who profits when misery becomes prestige entertainment? The film reveals workplace harassment, media manipulation and legal power, but it rarely examines Hollywood’s production apparatus, which can reproduce those same hierarchies while packaging the exposure as empowerment.

Australian viewers have a useful local point of comparison in the federal Senate’s 2017–18 inquiry into workplace sexual harassment, which exposed how fear, secrecy and organisational failure can obstruct complaints. Structural accountability requires training, enforceable duties, worker protections and consequences beyond a narrative reveal. A feminist reading can value the film’s anger and recognise its limits at once, insisting that witnessing abuse is not the same as changing the conditions that enabled it.

Keep watching with both eyes open

Evelyn’s story therefore offers a feminist alibi with a real feminist charge. It gives ageing women erotic authority, names the violence of patriarchal respectability and makes retaliation thrilling. Its alibi function appears when catharsis is mistaken for change, when individual monsters are blamed for systems, and when glamorous access to trauma is treated as universal female experience.

Use the film as a beginning rather than a verdict: keep discussing the seduction of its style and the limits of its accountability together. For more independent feminist criticism across film, television, internet culture and politics, subscribe to SCREAMING IN ALL CAPS, explore its archive and support a publication that refuses the comfort of easy answers.