Heather (Bobbi Salvör Menuez), the protagonist of Jacqueline Castel’s 1980s-set My Animal, at first seems like a run-of-the-mill teenage outcast of the sort you can find in any number of other films. She’s a socially awkward loner who feels stuck in her small, remote Canadian hometown, is uncomfortable in her own androgynous skin, and yearns for things beyond her reach, including a shot at making the local all-boys hockey team.
Heather’s already suffocating feelings of alienation are exacerbated by the condition, inherited from her father (Stephen McHattie), that causes her to turn into a werewolf on the night of a fall moon, and at the stroke of midnight. Though she’s only literally put in shackles during the hours of her transformation, her burgeoning sexuality, which explodes following a chance encounter with a coquettish figure skater, Jonny (Amandla Stenberg), only further reinforces just how trapped she is by her affliction, as well as how out of place she feels in her stifling surroundings.
While Castel’s beguilingly stylish and sensuous feature-length directorial debut employs the framework of a prototypical werewolf story, the filmmaker’s utilization of genre tropes is admirably prudent. The potential dangers posed by Heather’s condition are clear and continuously felt, but My Animal is less concerned with her werewolf transformation than with the aftershocks that result from her forging a deeper bond with Jonny.
The two young women share similarly dark senses of humor as well as equally constricting social and familial ties. Heather is forced to deal with her unstable, alcoholic mother, Patti (Heidi von Palleske), a woman clearly traumatized by decades of worrying about and caring for her lycanthropic husband and daughter. Meanwhile, Jonny is stuck in a pair of equally abusive relationships, one with a douchey jock named Rick (Cory Lipman), and one with her father (Scott Thompson), who doubles as her demanding and controlling skating coach.
It’s a sense of both longing and disconnection that brings Heather and Jonny together. And Castel’s woozy, densely atmospheric visual style, with its canted camera angles, lens distortions, and stark contrasts between blistering whites and lush neon reds and blues, accentuates the unfamiliar, even discomfiting, romance that blooms between the star-crossed lovers in their desolate environment. The moody beat-driven synth score by Boy Harsher—the electronic duo that screenwriter Jae Matthews fronts alongside Augustus Muller—even further enhances the dreamlike sheen cast over the proceedings, lending the film a propulsive, alluring energy.
Menuez and Stenberg are both stellar and have a remarkably natural chemistry, but it’s Menuez’s slippery performance that’s especially impressive, bringing a thrilling, knotty tension to the film as she seamlessly shifts between emotional extremes. Heather is forced both to hide her inner wolf from Jonny and her queer inclinations from her family, and, well, her entire town. And Menuez beautifully conveys the pain, anger, and heartache that comes from hiding who you really are while also revealing a nascent inner strength and a lust for life that has, somewhat understandably, been kept at bay by her protective father.
Castel perhaps too heavily prioritizes My Animal’s maximalist aesthetic vibe over the particulars of its narrative, but the uniformly strong performances keep the film grounded enough in a discernibly gritty reality that the characters’ humanity and emotions shine through. Or, at least, that is, until the final act, as a couple of sudden, tragic turns and one abrupt ending betray My Animal as the work of a first-time feature filmmaker. It’s a disappointingly flat finish to an otherwise enticingly ambiguous creation, yet Castel’s strengths working with actors and as an orchestrator of mood prove that she’s a talent worth taking seriously.
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