An early confinement, an isolated family in the middle of nowhere and a father who is losing his temper. We immediately think of Shiningthe terrifying novel by Stephen King, brought to the screen by Stanley Kubrick (1980). The American director probably had in mind The Hour of the Wolf (1968), a wild film by Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman in which Johan Borg (Max von Sydow) also succumbs to violence, which he carefully documents in writing under the distraught gaze of his partner (Liv Ullmann).
A few years later, in 1986, Australian director Peter Weir adapted the novel by American writer Paul Theroux,
Mosquito Coast (1981), another example of domestic tyranny. The fantasy of the father, a brilliant and zany inventor, gradually becomes a distressing trap with no escape.
Marital Prisons
The subject of domestic violence is not new. We find numerous examples in literature such as in the astonishing – and false – dialogue between Leo and Sophie Tolstoy: The Kreutzer Sonata And Whose fault is it?edifying texts on the confinement of marriage and limitless patriarchal domination. More recently, Éric Reinhardt published Love and the forests (published in 2014, adapted for cinema in 2023), a decade after Emmanuel Carrère had narrated the Jean-Claude Romand affair, this man who hid his false and double life before decimating his family, by opting for an enlightening title (The Adversary2000).
In most cases, physical or internal confinement irremediably leads to the act. And the family, subject to the good will of the father, undergoes its gradual slide towards violence that is less and less controllable.
Contemporary themes give new vigor to this literature. The confinement linked to the Covid-19 pandemic happened there, during which domestic and intra-family violence exploded. Declined in multiple forms, survivalism fuels ecological themes, but also nourishes reactionary and far-right thinking.
Above all, it fits easily into a post-apocalyptic atmosphere – how can we not think here of The Road (The Road2006), the breathtaking text by the American writer Cormac McCarthy? The multiple ramifications of these themes also result in a feminist politicization of the genre. Two recent novels bear witness to this.
Dad “hot cold”
The Sanctuarya novel by Laurine Roux (first publication in August 2020), narrates the survival of a family in a post-apocalyptic world, isolated in a mountain of birch trees, where birds carrying a virus as terrible as it is unidentifiable are the enemy to be killed. Only the father alone has the right to escape from this closed place: he is absent for a few days and returns with cans of gasoline. And ever more worrying information, which confirms the need to stay out of the world.
A handyman (also…), he is capable of making ingenious weapons under the admiring gaze of his daughters. To these, he entrusts specific tasks: cutting wood, hunting (with a bow, the imagination ofHunger Games has been there), go scrape salt in a nearby mine, indulge in physical exercises that have all the makings of an obstacle course. In doing so, he values them as much as he controls them.
The emancipation of one of them, with the – macabre – discovery of sexuality, will sound the death knell for this false tranquility. The arrival of periods is a trigger. The text was adapted into a graphic novel (published by Sarbacane in February 2026), by Jérôme Lavoine, who superbly depicts this nightmare in which the father is by turns funny, caring, cruel or angry: “With dad, it’s always like that. Hot cold, hot cold.”
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Here the girls falla novel by Stephene Gillieux (Phébus, January 2026) addresses a similar theme. A family finds itself little by little cloistered by the will of the father, who intends to withdraw it from the world to better establish his domination. The silent violence peaks when girls begin to “bleed between the legs”. Here again, the arrival of menstruation is a signal, that of another life, where the influence would fade. Unbearable idea. In this prison house, he built a bunker where he can lock them up twice.
Patriarchy from father to son
Maintained from generation to generation, the morbid ritual escapes the gaze of society. Distance from family is matched by a refusal to see neighbors. But here, spatiality matters little. It is the guilty indifference which is implicitly stigmatized, with the exception of the late lucidity of a teacher.
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Stephene Gillieux depicts paternal brutality, but also begins its transmission to the son who, under cover of “tradition”will be called upon to perpetuate male savagery and control – here absolute – of women’s bodies. As much as the children have a first name, the father is reduced to his patriarchal function called “the father”.
“The door slams again. The father rushes into the room, dragging Dag after him. Everything is happening very quickly. Mette disappears under the table. The father shouts and splits the space, the eldest at the end of his fist. Dag bounces against the walls, receives his rain of blows in the kidneys, arms, thighs. But the father doesn’t let her go. He grabs her hair and pulls her across the room, then up the stoop to the trapdoor that leads to the bunker.
The father takes the key out of his pocket and throws it to Finn.
“Open, son!”
The terrible possibility of an island
For a long time the geography of confinement was a matter of united men, of Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe, 1719) The mysterious island
(Jules Verne, 1875). In a light mode, Aurélie Valognes captured this imagination to turn it into a lesson in sorority (The FugueJC Lattès, March 2025). But this is an exception.
Because, gradually, the island utopia revealed its carceral character, proving less and less fruitful and more and more threatening and devious. Initially an external threat, violence is now an internal, intra-family danger.
Today, Laurine Roux and Stephene Gillieux show the harmful consequences for women. Because it is essentially a question of perpetuating the patriarchal model by removing it from the real world where it is threatened. Survivalism as a continuation of patriarchy by other means: the birth of a new genre?
