The Little Death (2014)
Directed by Josh Lawson
No — The Little Death is not woke, scoring 4 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
The Little Death arrives from Australia in 2014 with five loosely braided vignettes about suburban Sydney couples and the private urges they would prefer not to discuss at dinner.
Consciousness Markers
The film takes female sexual desire and fantasy seriously as subject matter, but its treatment (including a controversial rape-fantasy vignette) is more provocation than feminist argument.
The cast is almost entirely white Australian actors with no evident effort toward diverse or inclusive casting; the ensemble reflects the default demographics of its milieu.
No explicit LGBTQ+ themes or characters; the film's vignettes center on heterosexual couples and their fetishes, with no queer storyline of note.
The film is a bawdy comedy that aims to titillate and amuse rather than preach; it carries essentially no didactic or moralizing energy.
No engagement with race, racial identity, or racial politics whatsoever.
No environmental or climate themes present.
No critique of capitalism, wealth, or class structures; the film is confined to suburban domestic and sexual dynamics.
No body-positivity messaging; bodies appear only as vehicles for the comedic fetish premises.
A deaf character appears in one vignette, but deafness is treated as a plot device for a sign-language gag rather than as neurodivergent representation or advocacy.
No historical subject matter to revise; the film is a contemporary suburban comedy.
Why it received this score
The Little Death arrives from Australia in 2014 with five loosely braided vignettes about suburban Sydney couples and the private urges they would prefer not to discuss at dinner. A man feigns grief to arouse his partner. A woman discovers her husband's fetish and dutifully accommodates it. Another couple negotiates a role-play scenario involving a stranger, a blindfold, and an exhausting amount of logistics. Josh Lawson writes and directs with the timing of a sketch comedian and the nerve of a man who has never been told no. This is a sex comedy, unapologetically, and it treats the bedroom as a laboratory rather than a pulpit.
There is a faint pulse of cultural awareness here. The film takes female desire seriously as subject matter, which is not nothing, though the notorious rape-fantasy segment turns that seriousness into a provocation most viewers will find harder to defend than to endure. Beyond that, the picture keeps its gaze narrow. The cast is white, the couples are straight, and race, class, money, and the wider world never intrude. A deaf character turns up in one vignette, and deafness becomes the mechanism for a sign-language joke. Bodies are punchlines. Nobody worries about the planet. Suburban Sydney, in this telling, contains no politics at all, only appetites.
This is, in the end, a film with no sermon in it, and that absence is its own small relief. It wants to make an audience titter and wince, and it largely succeeds. The cultural ledger, however, remains nearly blank. Some films carry the moral burdens of their era. This one carries a pair of handcuffs and a punchline.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
A comedy film that looks into the loosely connected lives of people with strange sexual fantasies.
Questions about The Little Death
Is The Little Death woke?
No — The Little Death is not woke, scoring 4 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Little Death have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Feminist Agenda at 20.
How does The Little Death compare to other 2014 movies?
It ranks #224 of the 303 films from 2014 we've scored; their average is 13. The wokest is Selma (68).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.