Black Butterfly (2017)

Black Butterfly arrives with the modest pedigree of a 2008 French television film, Papillon Noir, repackaged for American audiences with Antonio Banderas as a blocked screenwriter and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the drifter he foolishly invites into his home. The cabin is remote, the power lines are down, and the typewriter clicks away at the words I'm stuck. This is a chamber piece about two men circling each other, and it has no interest in anything beyond that circle. The film wants to be a nasty little thriller about guilt, and on that narrow front it mostly succeeds.

The cultural inventory here is thin. A Spanish lead and a scattering of European faces give the cast an international texture, but the story never pauses to make a point of it. Piper Perabo's Laura exists to be threatened, then revealed as something else, and the women of the film serve the machinery of male paranoia. There is no LGBTQ+ material, no engagement with race as a social force, no body politics, no neurodivergent framing for Paul's creative paralysis. The dead phone lines and the darkened farm read as isolation mechanics, nothing more. A viewer hunting for climate allegory will find a fuse box.

The writer's money troubles get a mention, though the film treats them as personal humiliation instead of an indictment of a system. Jack's long speeches are threats, not sermons, which keeps the preachiness at zero. That leaves a competent, slightly musty thriller that never once turns to address the audience about how to feel. In an era of cinema that lectures, this one simply locks the door. Its social consciousness is minimal, and it seems untroubled by the omission.