Three artfully scary VIFF films that explore the nightmare of adolescence
My Animal blends poetic horror and hockey; Bitten is a dark and gorgeously shot fairy tale; Octopus Skin finds fear in an eccentric family
Bitten (La Morsure)
My Animal
My Animal screens September 30 at 6:15 pm and October 2 at 3:30 pm at International Village (both with a Q&A with the director and crew); Bitten screens September 29 at 6:30 pm at the Cinematheque and October 4 at 8:30 pm at Vancity Theatre; and Octopus Skin screens October 1 at 6:30 pm at the Cinematheque and October 4 at 3:45 pm at Vancity Theatre.
GOD KNOWS, NO ONE gets an easy adolescence, but at least most of us are spared the lycanthropy. No such luck for Heather, the young woman at the centre of My Animal, one of three notable titles at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival that take on a favourite cinematic theme: the nightmare quality of pubescence and young adulthood, when the body is an alien thing and desire becomes a tangle of heated confusion and shame.
From the Altered States program, My Animal shares some DNA with another Canadian film, 2000’s Ginger Snaps, bleeding its central metaphor (so to speak) to find poetic horror in awakening sexuality, but also suppressed female rage. In this case, Heather (impressively underplayed by Bobbi Salvör Menuez) happens to be a hockey-obsessed tomboy in small town Ontario, apparently at some point in the ‘80s. The film’s strategy is to build an eerily timeless world, socked in by snow and forest darkness (The Company of Wolves comes to mind), until the arrival of a glaring anachronism called Jonny (Amanda Stenberg), a figure skater who comes to town with her own confused desires. The film is so low-key in the face of its own fantastique that even the great Stephen McHattie pulls back as Heather’s sympathetic father. Conversely, a cameo by Kid in the Hall Scott Thompson should be welcome but feels out-of-register, as do a couple other choices made by director Jacqueline Castel. Still, My Animal deserves your attention, which is heavily rewarded in the film’s final minutes when, with all hell about to break loose, Heather delivers the film’s climactic line to the deep satisfaction of the viewer. Again, so to speak.
From France, Bitten (La Morsure) really makes a meal of its fairy-tale premise, in which two Catholic teens break out of an all-girl convent school for an overnight costume party in a decaying rural mansion.
Françoise (Léonie Dahan-Lamort) is ostensibly acting on superstition, believing that she received a premonition of her own death in a dream. She’s also clearly jealous of best friend Delphine’s (Lilith Grasmug) advanced sexual experiences. Set at the end of the ’60s and featuring two hand-holding elfins in a midnight descent into the mysteries of Eros and Thanatos, there’s an obvious debt here to the work of Jean Rollin, who gave horror cinema unsurpassed visions of beautifully sad young women abducted by the supernatural in films like 1972’s Requiem pour un vampire. Delivered to the party by a Renfield-esque character they encounter at a café (Fred Blin has the vibe of the late-great British actor David Warner), Françoise is eventually confronted by an image straight out of Rollin, when she finds herself stalked by a shaggy-haired but oddly noble youth who may or not be a real vampire.
Sex and death do indeed ensue in Romain de Saint-Blanquat’s near-perfect film, which otherwise benefits from gorgeous photography and a killer soundtrack, but Bitten maintains a delicate ambiguity throughout. It’s decidedly a film about the passage into adulthood, which is a haunted trip for everyone. It’s also an exercise in pleasure for those (I suspect Romain de Saint-Blanquat is among them) whose own youthful curiosities alighted on the modish softcore eurosleaze that flooded the VHS market in the ‘80s.
Octopus Skin.
Oddest of the bunch is Octopus Skin, about three teen siblings who while away their time on a private island somewhere off the coast of an unnamed city, swimming, fishing, sleeping together, or, in the case of Lia (Hazel Powell), playing with cotton dolls and presiding over a baroque dollhouse that matches their decaying home. Twins Iris and Ariel (Isadora Chávez and Juan Francisco Vinueza) are particularly intimate with each other and they all vie for the affection of Mother (Cristina Marchan), whose psychological illness isn’t given a name in this wilfully elliptical film, about a family with its own rules, boundaries, and emotional language. Father is absent, although that particular mystery only deepens when Iris transgresses the family’s most devout rule and adventures into the city, like a sullen but curious Kaspar Hauser with menstrual blood dripping down her leg.
Of the three, Octopus Skin is easily the most challenging to anything resembling conventional morality. These children do everything together, including activities generally reserved for furtive solo visits to the bathroom. Like the family’s impenetrable private world, the film’s self-containment relies on the total bond between Iris and Ariel, and its attitude lies somewhere between the mystic longing of Walkabout and a long, weird sub-genre of horror movies about eccentric families, usually charged with an implicit suggestion of incest.
Aside from all its technical strengths—it’s a beautiful movie—Octopus Skin is special for going all-in with its take on adolescent fear. If My Animal and Bitten both demand that characters muster the courage to embrace being a grown-up, Octopus Skin is perverse enough to wish for a flight back into the comforts of childhood, whatever that entails.
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