Hushpuppy, a six-year-old girl lives with her father in what she calls 'the bathtub", a small impoverished bayou community living on the other side of the New Orleans Levees. Hushpuppy is a beacon of childhood optimism in a struggling world which comes to be threatened by massive storm. Beasts of the Southern Wild is an original piece of filmmaking that is pseudo-coming of age story about perseverance against all odds. Young Hushpuppy routinely escapes to her extraordinary imagination, attempting to make sense of a world around her. Never breaking from it's point-of-view, this film gives a very in-depth look at this world exclusively through the eyes of young Hushpuppy. The relationship between Hushpuppy and her father, a tough-minded authoriative figure, is the high point of the film. At first the viewer questions this man's love and admiration for his daughter, only to become clear that he is very caring of his daughter, only hoping to provide her with thick-skin, ready for a world full of disappointment. The story unfolds naturally, and definitely has some interesting themes but I was really hoping for a much more poetic film that touches on bigger themes. For me the film seemed to rely far to heavily on Hushpuppy's voiceover, instead of actually achieving a poetic narrative about our humanity. Maybe I am being harsh cause I think there are other films that capture similar themes in a much stronger way, but for me Beasts of the Southern Wild is the type of film that is overpraised because of it's ideals and originality more so than its execution. I really liked the concept, was definitely emotional invested in the father-daughter relationship (at least towards the end), yet I don't think it was a deep as it could/should have been. 7/10
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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