Several films screening at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival explore the idea that teen girls are not alright, including The Serpent’s Skin, Foreigner, and Lucid.
Read on for my capsule reviews of all three films.
The Serpent’s Skin
Scripted by Alice Maio Mackay and co-writer Benjamin Pahl Robinson, The Serpent’s Skin follows trans girl Anna (Alexander McVicker) as she moves to the big city. There she meets weird, but decent Danny (Jordan Dulieu) and goth tattoo artist Gen (Avalon Fast), sleeping with and befriending both as a dark, serpentine power begins attacking people. Think The Craft meets Scanners.
Mackay’s bold colour scheme, elliptical editing, and counter culture attitude are all present in The Serpent’s Skin, but the narrative moves at a more deliberate pace than her previous films, which allows the characters time to breathe between set pieces.
Featuring genuine chemistry between McVicker and Fast, the return of The People’s Joker Vera Drew as editor, and good special effects make-up by Dom Keeley, The Serpent’s Skin is another solid entry in Mackay’s rapidly expanding filmography.
Lucid
Directors Deanna Milligan and Ramsey Fendall expand their short of the same name, which features Caitlin Acken Taylor as Mia, an artist struggling to find her voice. After taking too much of an experimental drug, Mia begins to remember repressed memories that may hold the key to her artistic block. The only issue? She doesn’t realize that there may have been a reason why she clamped down on the past in the first place.
The punk film was shot on 35 and 16mm film and feels bold, experimental and refreshing. It’s a big swing kind of film that features plenty of hallucinatory imagery, albeit occasionally at the expense of its storytelling. It’s a quintessential example of a “throw things at the wall to see what sticks” kind of film.
Still, Lucid feels daring for what it is attempting to do and the film is never boring. Taylor, in particular, delivers a raw and vulnerable performance as the character who undergoes a journey that even she may not fully be prepared for. Lucid undoubtedly qualifies as a woman on the verge film.
Foreigner
Ava Maria Safai‘s debut feature finds Iranian teenager Yasamin (Rose Deghan) struggling to adapt to life in Canada. She’s been working on her English by parroting soaps, but her father Ali (Ashkan Nejati) and grandmother (Maryam Sadeghi) don’t understand the social pressure she feels to fit in.
Almost immediately Yasi is taken under the wing of predatory “Queen Bee” Rachel (Chloë MacLeod) and her doppelganger followers, but their micro-aggressions suggest a nefarious intent. Are they truly interested in what makes Yasi different or is this merely an attempt to indoctrinate her and force Yasi to conform to the dominant (read: blonde) culture?
Foreigner traffics in familiar tropes when it comes to both its YA and immigrant components, but the film’s depiction of racism and peer pressure is surprisingly subdued. There’s also a culturally specific demonic entity in the mix, but Safai’s screenplay is disappointingly uninterested in exploring both the mythology and the bullying. The movie infers that both the supernatural elements and the high school politics are equally dangerous, but the film is reticent to fully interrogate that argument.
The result is a mildly defanged film, complete with ambiguous ending that feels like a cop-out. Foreigner has promise, but the film needed to push it further.
The Serpent’s Skin, Lucid, and Foreigner all played at the Fantasia International Film Festival. Release info on all three films is TBD.
The post Fantasia Capsule Reviews: The Girls Are Not Alright in ‘The Serpent’s Skin’, ‘Foreigner’ & ‘Lucid’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.
