Confession—for a few minutes there, I thought the Girl Asleep was going to be me. Ultra-mannered, laconic 1970s pacing. Static-shot cuts that would have made Altman impatient. A horribly realistic rendering of 1970s blear-tastic coloration. Painfully disaffected school kids dressed in school uniforms that made them look like employees some kind of Undead MacDonald’s (or … is there any other kind actually?) and who didn’t move or speak.
It was a long couple of minutes.
I got over it.
Girl Asleep is a coming-of-age/sexual awakening tale set in a surreal proto-’70s South Australia, and it’s a bit like Wes Anderson ate a bunch of Jimson weed and conked out. (I mean that in a good way.) Greta (Bethany Whitmore), who has recently relocated to a new town, is about to turn 15. She’s … well, alienated. And who wouldn’t be? Evil triplets have targeted her at school, her mom is an Ubercougar, her Dad is a walking Flight of the Conchords track (yes, I know they’re New Zealanders, but bear with me) and her older sister and the sister’s hypersexualized boyfriend are constantly making out in front of her (occasionally on top of her). Plus, there might or might not be a bunch of monsters in the woods behind her house.
Greta has one friend, a preposterously nerdy and preternaturally enthusiastic ginger-head named Elliott (Harrison Feldman). Elliott thinks everything about Greta is awesome. Greta’s clearly not sure she agrees.
Greta doesn’t want to have a 15th birthday party, but her mother proceeds to concoct one, and a sort of Dadaist Wizard of Oz fantasia ensues in which Greta must confront a bunch of scary predators, some of whom erupt from her own subconscious and some of whom are probably really there, and contend with the fact that she is no longer a child.
The film’s premise is not super-complicated, and it combines a lot of very familiar tropes with some wildly quirky gestures to create its own little space. The acting, overall, is really very good. (The protagonist is dangerously close to not developing a personality in time, but that seems more directorial than anything.) Extreme props in particular to Harrison Feldman, whose performance as the hopeless-but-unsinkable Elliott is arguably the best part of the film, and to Matthew Whittet, who knocks it out of the park as Greta’s dingbat-with-a-heart-of-gold father.
Basically, if you appreciate the Uncanny Valley, you will probably like this film. If stylized to the point of mannered bugs you, you might be bugged. Regardless, Girl Asleep is wall-to-wall quirky, frequently very funny, and occasionally hints at the actual horror of being an adolescent girl in a pretty compelling way.
Director: Rosemary Myers
Writer: Matthew Whittet
Starring: Bethany Whitmore, Harrison Feldman, Matthew Whittet
Release Date: September 23, 2016
Amy Glynn is a Super Famous Poet. Her interests include non-plagiaristic suicide, pet psychiatry, Peter Gabriel, The New Yorker, Italian wine, Grant Achatz, the President of Paraguay, Federico Garcia Lorca, home beekeeping and serendipity. You can follow her on Twitter, where she has a long way to go to reach 1.4 million followers.