To be a teenaged girl is… to be proscribed.* To be a teenaged girl in the middle of fucking nowhere who cannot, will not fit into the tiny box the people around you want to keep you in? Unbearable.
There’s maybe not a lot entirely original in what My Animal wants to say about proscribed teenaged-girlhood, but what it has to say, it says with enormous confidence and panache. Even if some of that is a bit, erm, borrowed.
Heather (the enticingly preternatural-looking Bobbi Salvör Menuez: Landline) lives with her somewhat dysfunctional family in a snowy, remote Canadian small town. There’s something odd about them, and it definitely goes beyond the sad drunkeness of her mom (Heidi von Palleske: Red), even if the other kids make fun of her for that. No, it might have more to do with the shackles that come out during the full moon, and the extra locks on the bedroom doors.
Okay, yes, this is a family of werewolves. Director Jacqueline Castel and screenwriter Jae Matthews, both making their feature debuts, kinda sorta hide, at first, not only that Heather’s family knows what’s going on with her but that it’s going on with them, too. But the way that secrets are kept here mirror how this family keeps its secrets from the outside world, and reflect how what seems “normal” inside our homes, because it’s literally our everyday life, might not be.
The temporal setting here is vaguely 80s-ish, from Heather’s digital Casio wristwatch to Augustus Muller’s John Carpenter–esque, retro-video-nasty score. Which only emphasizes the isolation; there isn’t even the Internet yet to escape to. It’s bad enough for any teenager in this miserable place, where there’s little do but hang out at the ice rink or get drunk in the high-school parking lot. But it’s worse for Heather — she’s so alone here. And then, when Jonny (Amandla Stenberg: The Darkest Minds, Rio 2) suddenly turns up, and doesn’t seem turned off by Heather’s strange vibe — cuz, oh yeah, being-into-girls is Heather’s other nonconformist thing — Heather clings to her…
We’re left to presume why Jonny never gets wholly onboard with Heather’s weirdness, but that’s just part of the deliberate uncomfortableness with, you know, everything that’s going on here. This is a mysterious film about the sensual eroticism of teen girls’ fantasies, visceral and a bit freaky but also sweetly tender. It’s about neglected, miserable kids, and feral female sexuality, and if it’s all a bit disheveled and unresolved, that feels about right. For Heather is only just embarking on her uncanny life, and the tone of eldritch mourning that hangs over My Animal suggests a dawning awareness of just how difficult her journey is going to be.
*Yes, teen boys are proscribed too, but in different ways, and even though male adolescence has been greatly explored onscreen, those proscriptions have in many ways been avoided. Movies about teen boys are all too often about what teen boys want to do and are encouraged to do, and much less about what they are forbidden to do. (It’s on male filmmakers to rectify this.)
more films like this:
• Raw [Prime US | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK]
• When Animals Dream (Når dyrene drømmer) [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK]
