Simmering with rage: Kitchens and intimate partner violence in Eva Sørhaug’s 90 Minutes

Abstract

This article examines domestic violence committed by white heterosexual men in a 2010s Norwegian film by a female director. This film stands out for its focus on male perpetrators, not female victims, contributing a fictional presentation of three men who struggle to meet societal norms for parents and partners in the Nordic gender-equal family of the twenty-first century. Eva Sørhaug’s use of cinematic space drills deep to probe the men’s pain, employing both the camera’s perspective and the significance of interiors of family homes to visually assess the male characters as they break. The socially constructed spaces of the kitchen and the bedroom augment tensions within the rigid confines of hegemonic masculinity and the men’s failure to attain those norms. The cinematic portrayal of intimate partner violence and homicide sheds light on male perpetrators and invokes societal culpability in the perpetuation of abuse.