Getting what you want is a double edged sword. Being told that you don’t know what you want or deserve what you want is another beast altogether, which brings us to our final movie A Fantastic Woman (2017).

A Fantastic Woman is different from the other three movies mentioned in several ways. For starters it focuses on an adult, though a young one, who is being treated younger than she deserves to be. Second, the adult in question is a trans woman Marina (Daniel Vega). And the final difference is that while the girls in the previous movies were all making and carrying out plans, no matter how ill advised or grisly, Marina is instead reacting to circumstances and trying to move forward.

The movie starts with Marina and her older lover Orlando (Francisco Reyes) celebrating a birthday with a night out. They’re clearly in love and truly happy together but when Orlando wakes up in severe pain and dies at the hospital of an aneurysm, things quickly go from bad to worse. Marina, as a trans person, has been living her life in the fringes. She works as a waitress and a lounge singer and had been living with Orlando before he died. Stability is not something that occurs naturally in her day-to-day and the amount of disruption she receives because of Orlando’s death threatens to tear apart the existence she’s cobbled together.

Most of Orlando’s family are upset, not only by his death but with the partner he left behind; they’re actively aggressive toward Marina. Aside from Orlando’s brother Gabo (Luis Gnecco), Orlando’s family mocks and harasses Marina. They try to force her out of her home and cause scenes where she works. Anyone who’s been trying to hold their tenuous life together knows both the feeling of having their ability to barely scrape by threatened and the anxiety that comes along with it. This anxiety creeps in and grows until Marina decides she’s tired of just surviving and demands more.

After being barred from attending the funeral, Marina shows up anyway and refuses to leave until Gabo calmly leads her out. She fights back against Orlando’s wife and kids who tell her she’s an abomination by attacking them in their car. She’s tired of attempting to be “a good girl” and decides that if everyone wants her to be a monster then she’ll be a monster. Naturally, this drains her emotionally, and we see her regrouping at the home of a former voice teacher who gently chides her for using him as crutch and abandoning him when it’s convenient for her.

Marina is not presented as a simplistic victim but someone who has spent her life sorting everything out, which means sometimes being an acerbic or cold person. That’s part of living after all, right? She isn’t exempt from her faults and she sometimes dismisses people who are trying to reach out to her. We’re also privy to the fact that help can often come with an asterisk, that good intentions usually bring with them further conditions. The scene with her teacher is a grounding moment for Marina, one where she realizes the difference between struggles based on who she is and struggles that she creates for herself.

The past few years have seen an explosion in developed and unusual female characters. What used to be limited to ingenues or femme fatales has now expanded to include realistic depictions of complex women and girls. There have always been “bad girl” characters but, in the grand tradition of everything revolving around men, past bad girls have usually been products of male anxiety or fantasy rather than being interesting and three dimensional. We still see versions of the flat femme fatale dressed up as “complicated” (cough, Gone Girl, cough) but fortunately we’re also getting the weird, the demented, the bloodthirsty, the selfish, the ambitious, the strong-willed, and all the other variations of women and girls that we see in reality and in ourselves.