On Wednesday night, I put the kids to bed, poured myself a glass of wine and took The Red Pill.

That is to say, I watched the men's rights movie that has been chased out of cinemas in Australia. The title of the film – taken from The Matrix, in which Keanu Reeves is offered the choice of a red pill (which delivers lacerating truth and self knowledge) or a blue pill (blissful ignorance) – is portentous. Viewers are invited to infer that revelations – perhaps shocking ones – will almost certainly be forthcoming. Protests! Cancellation of screenings! This must be some heavy stuff. I paid my $6.95 to rent the title, and sat back, prepared for outrage.

Cassie Jaye's film The Red Pill is journalistically weak. Credit:YouTube

Now I'm a feminist. A feature shared – I discover, as the film opens – with director and narrator Cassie Jaye, a friendly Oklahoman who seems always to be having a good hair day. She explains that her feminism derives from having moved to Hollywood when she was 18 to pursue an acting career, and finding herself only ever cast as one of the scantily-clad teen cuties butchered in the early scenes of budget horror flicks. (This being a dot-the-Is, cross-the-Ts type documentary, we are shown some brief sequences of a younger Cassie being murdered by a giant lizard. Her story checks out.)

Cassie explains she soon opted out of acting, in favour of directing, and went on to be a documentary film-maker, on a range of irreproachable subjects including women's health (cue images of sad-looking women), teen celibacy (girls in confirmation dresses) and gay marriage (two neat T-shirted men holding hands in a field).