The Starling Girl Review: A Sensitive Religious Drama About Giving in to Desire

The film is an impressively complicated and compassionate drama about shame and desire.

The Starling Girl
Photo: Bleecker Street

Writer-director Laurel Parmet’s The Starling Girl quickly draws us into the remote Kentucky community at its center, a place small enough that everyone knows everyone else. Wide-open spaces stretch out from it in all directions and keep the rest of the world at bay. Most importantly, it’s a place where all of life revolves around the church.

In this stifling place, every single move a person makes doesn’t escape Old Testament judgment. One early scene even shows us a teenager being forced to confess to the sin of watching pornography in front of the entire congregation so that they might forgive him.

Within this milieu, we meet 17-year-old Jem (Eliza Scanlen). At home, she’s forced to play the role of doting daughter, working tirelessly to care for her younger siblings. Her mother, Heidi (Wrenn Schmidt), watches her every move like a hawk, her face fixed in a permanent expression of godly judgment. Her father, Paul (Jimmi Simpson), is a recovering addict who relies on the rigidity of religion to prevent him from crumbling. Their faith doesn’t seem to provide either of them with much joy, just a hard set of rules that they can cling to and impose on others.

Advertisement

Jem wants more than their pious lifestyle has allowed them. She wants to lead her church’s dance troupe and show off her talents. She wants to please her parents and impress the rest of her congregation. More than anything, she wants to get closer to the handsome youth pastor, Owen (Lewis Pullman), who’s just returned from completing missionary work in Puerto Rico.

The magnetic center of The Starling Girl, Scanlen’s performance is nuanced and protean in a way that perfectly captures this most confusing time of Jem’s life. She plays the girl as a confusion of appetites, one minute plucking the largest cake from the church picnic table with childish enthusiasm, the next gazing longingly after Owen, eyes ablaze with adult desires.

YouTube video

These contradictions are exacerbated by the way Jem’s community seems to want to both lock her in a state of perpetual childhood innocence and fast-track her into adulthood. They push her toward an arranged marriage while acting aghast at even the slightest sign of her sexual maturity (in one early scene, another churchgoer scolds Jem for wearing a bra that’s visible beneath her dancewear). Essentially, she has the responsibilities of adulthood thrust upon her without ever being offered the autonomy that is supposed to come with it.

Advertisement

The thing about the sort of repression that The Starling Girl homes in on is how vulnerable it leaves people to abuse and exploitation. For her entire life, Jem has been taught by everyone around her that everything she wants is wrong. She knows, deep in her blood, that this isn’t true, and throughout the film we see her push back against it through her dancing and in those stolen moments with her father when they listen to his old band’s secular music. She can tell that the pleasure these things bring her isn’t wrong, no matter how often she’s told otherwise.

So when Owen wanders into her life and assures her that what they’re doing feels too good to be wrong, it’s much harder for her to fully decipher the truth of his intentions. She doesn’t know that the married, older man plying the teenage girl with false promises is behavior that she should be on the lookout for, because her community has prevented stories of such predatory behavior from reaching her ears. To Jem, Owen is the first person she’s ever met who doesn’t treat her like a child and acknowledges her desires, so, naturally, she’s smitten.

Advertisement

For his part, Pullman does an excellent job playing Owen as a figure who looks attractive out of focus but becomes less impressive the closer you get to him. The man has a laidback charm that, combined with a certain air of worldliness, makes him feel like everyone’s big brother. But the further the story progresses, the more we see him for what he really is—a man who never had the courage to separate himself from the community that also stifles him and who now uses a teenage girl as an outlet for that frustration. If, then, the film’s tale of religious repression and bad romance walks a familiar path a little too closely to provide any new revelations, it remains an impressively complicated and compassionate drama about shame and desire.

Score: 
 Cast: Eliza Scanlen, Lewis Pullman, Jimmi Simpson, Austin Abrams, Wrenn Schmidt, Jessamine Burgum  Director: Laurel Parmet  Screenwriter: Laurel Parmet  Distributor: Bleecker Street  Running Time: 116 min  Rating: R  Year: 2023  Buy: Video

Ross McIndoe

Ross McIndoe is a Glasgow-based freelancer who writes about movies and TV for The Quietus, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Wisecrack, and others.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.