Karly

Content warning: This post discusses Cracks by Sheila Kohler and the 2009 film adaptation directed by Jordan Scott. Both versions contain explicit and implicit themes of sexual abuse, grooming, teacher-student coercion, suicide, emotional manipulation, and power imbalances. This post engages with those themes critically and includes specific references to the narrative. Please take care while reading.

There are stories you encounter when you’re ready, stories that meet you with their full weight only when you have the tools to carry them, stories that feel like gentle hands on your back saying yes, you can understand this now, but Cracks was never one of those for me, and maybe that’s why it still lingers.

Cracks found me far too early, long before I knew what to call certain dynamics or how to hold space for uncomfortable narratives, and yet I watched it, and later read it, with a kind of breathless awe, not because I fully understood what it was doing but because I felt, instinctively and almost viscerally, that something about it was dangerous, that something beautiful was being weaponised, that something inside the story was reaching for me and not in a way that made me feel safe.

I saw the film before I read the novel, which meant I fell into the world through visuals first, and the music, gorgeous by Javier Navarrete. The fog-draped woods, the cracked swimming pool, the faded uniforms, the careful glow of candlelight against anxious teenage faces, and although I didn’t know what grooming was, or how coercion could be softened through aesthetics, I knew I was watching something that crossed lines even as it framed them poetically, and I knew, even then, that this wasn’t just a story about a teacher and her students, it was a story about desire that devours and admiration that collapses under its own weight.

Years later, when I was in undergrad, I returned to the novel, not just out of curiosity but out of a need to understand why it had lodged itself so firmly in my memory, and when I was asked to choose a literary text for a translation assignment, I knew without hesitation that I would choose Cracks, because I wanted to slow the story down, to pick apart its language word by word, to trace the mechanisms that made it feel so quiet and so sharp at once.

There was something about translating Kohler’s prose, sparse and surgical, elegant and clipped, that gave me permission to confront the discomfort without looking away, and I think part of me believed that if I could carry the sentences across from one language to another, if I could hold the structure and tone and breath of each line carefully enough, I would finally be able to understand why this story had taken root in me the way it had.

Beautiful Girls, Rotten Roots

If you’ve never read the novel or seen the film, here’s what you need to know: Cracks is set in a remote South African boarding school for girls, and it tells the story of a tight-knit group of students who are captivated by their glamorous and unpredictable diving teacher, Miss G, whose carefully curated image begins to unravel with the arrival of a new student named Fiamma, who is everything Miss G both desires and resents, and from there, the story becomes less about competition and more about control, less about admiration and more about violence disguised as closeness, about what happens when power and obsession bleed into each other until they become impossible to separate.

The novel is narrated by a first-person plural “we,” the collective voice of the girls looking back as adults, which immediately casts the reader into a strange liminal space between complicity and distance, because no single speaker takes responsibility for what happened, but all of them are implicated in the telling, and the use of the plural pronoun fractures the narrative’s moral center in a way that mirrors how power is diffused across groups, institutions, and silences.

In the film, things are slightly different, the perspective tightens, we follow Miss G more closely, watch her charm flicker and crack, watch her spin stories about a life of travel and glamour that slowly begins to reveal itself as invention, and yet the film never fully condemns her, it seduces us instead, with golden light and soft-focus shots and Eva Green’s performance, which is hypnotic and terrifying all at once, and because the story is framed in beauty, it becomes harder to name what’s wrong, and harder still to say it out loud.

Translation as Reckoning

When I chose Cracks for a translation assignment, it wasn’t just because I loved it, although I did. It was because I needed a reason to stay inside it longer, to engage with it not just as a reader but as a listener, as someone paying attention to tone and rhythm and choice, and the act of translating it forced me to confront the language of the novel on its own terms, to sit with the passive constructions, the avoidance of agency, the euphemisms that wrap violence in soft cotton, and I found myself both disturbed and impressed by how carefully it all held together.

Translation taught me that every omission is a decision, every modifier is doing emotional work, and every time something is “implied” rather than named, a choice is being made about who gets to speak and who gets to remain legible, and that knowledge made the novel both harder and easier to bear.

Language and Silence, Power and Distance

As a linguist, I read Cracks as a case study in failed pragmatics, the violations of conversational norms, the use of questions as weapons, the manipulation of power through silence and register, the strange tension between what is being said and what is being implied, because Miss G does not speak like someone stable, she speaks like someone performing closeness and control in equal measure, and the way her tone shifts when speaking to Fiamma is not just noticeable, it’s chilling.

She uses flattery and familiarity to mask command, and when that fails, she retreats into rhetoric, into stories that cannot be verified, into language that protects her by keeping her undefined, and the girls, though unsettled, do not challenge her directly, because they’ve been trained to admire and obey, and because the school itself rewards silence, politeness, performance.

The plural narration in the novel reflects this, constantly circling around what happened without naming it, using vague phrasing and evasive syntax, keeping the truth just out of reach, and as a reader, you begin to realise that this story is not just about what happened in the dormitory or at the edge of the pool, it’s about what was never said and what was never allowed to be said.

The Queer Gaze and Its Complications

One of the most complex elements of Cracks is its queerness, not because the story includes queer desire, which in itself is not harmful, but because it places that desire in the hands of a predator, a woman who uses longing as a form of possession, who crosses boundaries under the guise of closeness, and who ultimately causes irreparable harm, and the difficulty here is that the story frames that desire in beauty, in softness, in sadness, which makes it all the more disorienting.

I have seen this film described as tragic and romantic, but it is neither ,it is violent, slow, and emotionally manipulative, and while I understand the impulse to aestheticise, I think we have to be honest about the harm that can do, especially when queer characters are involved, especially when stories about desire are allowed to collapse into abuse without ever drawing a line between them.

Why I’m Still Writing About It

I’m writing about Cracks not because I want to excuse it or explain it away, but because I still think about it, because it shaped something in me, because it taught me how dangerous beauty can be when it is used to cover harm, because I watched it too young and read it again on purpose, because I translated it when I was just beginning to understand how language holds weight, and because even now, I don’t know how to let it go.

This is not a recommendation. It is not a defence. It is a reflection on how stories stay with us, even when they’re difficult, even when we wish they hadn’t found us when they did. It is a meditation on language and silence, power and admiration, beauty and violence. It is an attempt to make sense of something that still haunts me, not because it was misunderstood, but because it understood something I hadn’t yet learned how to name.

If you choose to engage with Cracks, do so with care, and with curiosity, and with the knowledge that some stories don’t comfort or redeem, they only ask you to look, and to keep looking, even when it hurts.