“Lady Parts” is a brave movie about women’s pain that can’t quite decide what kind of film it wants to be. It tackles a subject that deserves the spotlight, but the storytelling keeps dimming the lights.
Drawn from writer and executive producer Bonnie Gross’s experience and directed by Nancy Boyd, the film confronts vaginal pain and vulvar surgery head-on, a topic that still leaves many people with vaginas too embarrassed even to name it. On that level, “Lady Parts” is undeniably valuable: female-focused, rooted in lived experience, and determined to turn a taboo into something speakable, even shareable.
Valentina Tammaro, as Paige, does heroic work holding the script together. Her dry, wary wit and open vulnerability give the character a center of gravity the film itself often lacks, and you keep watching largely because she makes Paige feel complicated, human, and worth caring about.
Around her, the film leans into the discomfort of making her genital pain a family affair. Paige’s parents (Amy Lyndon and Peter Larney) are loving, generous, and relentlessly involved in ways that are both funny and disquieting. The father, in particular, is so over‑eagerly supportive that his presence around his daughter’s intimate medical crisis tips from endearing into overtly creepy; whether that creepiness is intentional is unclear, but the effect is unmistakable.
The larger issue is structural. “Lady Parts” wants to be two films at once: a story of a woman reclaiming her sexual life through a painful, invasive procedure, and an indie about a blocked writer too afraid to really test her talent. In practice, those threads compete, and the narrative rambles, revisiting the same beats and the same shock gags until they lose their charge. At feature length, the film feels overstretched—like material that might have been better served as a short, or as two or three compact streaming episodes tracking surgery, recovery, and creative rebirth.
That’s what makes “Lady Parts” frustrating: the importance of the subject is never in doubt, and the achievement of getting a film like this written, financed, and finished is real. It is hard to make a movie at all, harder still to make one about stigmatized women’s health that refuses to look away. On that effort, the filmmakers deserve a salute. But precisely because so many viewers will recognize themselves in Paige’s pain, you wish they had cut deeper—shortening, clarifying, and focusing—so that the film’s impact matched the urgency of its premise.
o that the film’s impact matched the urgency of its premise.
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Director
Nancy Boyd
Producer
Bonnie Gross
Cast
Valentina Tammaro, Amy Lyndon, Peter Larney, Lars Midthun
Cinematographer
Olaa Olabi
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