Dirty God opens with Jade (Vicky Knight), a young woman with severe burn scars across her face and torso, leaving the hospital wearing a clear, hard plastic protective mask. The image is like something for a horror film but the horror here is real. This working-class woman from the London projects, barely an adult, was violently assaulted in an acid attack by her abusive boyfriend and has been left permanently disfigured. Now she's trying to pick up her life as the single mother of a toddler and as a still-vital girl who likes to go out to clubs and hang with her friends. Her two-year-old daughter has been cared for by Jade's mother, a shoplifter who sells stolen clothes out of their apartment, and in the devastating reunion scene, the toddler cries at the sight of mummy.
Desperate to reclaim her old identity, she pins all her hopes of restorative plastic surgery on a foreign clinic she finds on the Internet, one that suspiciously promises results and takes her money before even examining her. Danish filmmaker Sacha Polak makes her English-language debut in this tough, realistic drama, which confronts misogyny and violence against women while addressing issues of self-image, identity, sexuality, and motherhood. Polack focuses on the trials of everyday situations, from enduring the stares and jokes from (almost entirely male) coworkers at a telemarketing job to simply taking her daughter out to play. She uses a documentary-like style in those scenes, bringing the camera close in on Knight's face and holding it while a range of emotions plays out in glances and through her body language. In other scenes, such as clubbing with her friends, saturated, pulsating colors and weaving cameras create an impressionistic quality as Jade releases her pent-up feelings through dance and the anonymity of a dark club.
Vicky Knight carries the film with her raw, powerful performance of a woman putting a defiant face on the anger and terror and anxiety roiling underneath. A non-actress making her feature debut, she surely draws on her own experiences for the role; she was badly burned in a house fire as a child and she puts those real-life scars on-screen, including discomforting nude scenes as she retreats to Internet sex portals for sexual release. It's a provocative film that deals frankly and nakedly with the powerful emotions that Jade faces in the aftermath of violent trauma and the painful daily reckoning with the stares and heartless insults of others. The film premiered at Sundance in 2020 and was released directly to VOD later in the year as American theaters closed in the face of the pandemic. Not rated. Features explicit sexuality and nudity and adult situations and language.