Denis's Trouble Every Day and the Wendigo Cycle, continued

In the second brutal cannibal scene in the film, Shane confronts hotel maid Christelle in the hotel employee locker room to (the film suggests) avoid having sex with his wife and devouring her. After the multiple images of Christelle as both maid and human, however, the camera pulls away instead of veering in on her body as landscape. 

What begins as a stolen sexual moment shown in medium long shot, however, becomes a violent rape scene amplified by Christelle’s unanswered screams. Unlike the vivid cannibal sequence with Coré, however, the horror is revealed visually primarily after the attack, with shots of Christelle’s now-motionless body and Shane’s bloodied face. Tears run through his blood, as well, matching the lines of blood on the curtain during his post-murder shower.

He and June are reunited with a puppy to provide the warmth he cannot. But the suggestion that Shane’s one attack might have satiated him becomes less reliable when juxtaposed with June’s frightened and distrustful eyes when he hugs her and asks her to take him home. 

Although Trouble Every Day complicates a frontier myth that constructs a land as female to justify the exploitation of its resources, its conclusion offers no solution to the destructive results of the metaphor. Instead, Shane’s seeming ability to contain his desires by satisfying them through the literal cannibalizing of the native “other” continues the wetiko/Wendigo cycle Forbes describes.