Fantasia Festival '19: Darlin'

***/****
starring Lauryn Canny, Bryan Batt, Nora-Jane Noone, Pollyanna McIntosh
written and directed by Pollyanna McIntosh

Fantasia Festival 2019 runs July 11-August 1 in Montreal, Quebec. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Walter Chaw A promising and at times exceptional hyphenate debut, Pollyanna McIntosh's Darlin' continues the saga of Jack Ketchum's feral, cannibalistic Family with this sequel to Lucky McKee's inexplicably controversial The Woman. A few years after her escape from a family of Evangelicals, The Woman (McIntosh) drops off feral child Darlin' (Lauryn Canny) at a Catholic hospital, where Darlin' falls under the kind ministrations of Nurse Tony (Cooper Andrews). It's an interesting conceit that this wild thing, having seen the dangers of living without health care, should leave her charge at an institution peopled by the same society that had previously tried to "civilize" her through imprisonment and rape. Viewers familiar with The Woman will place that Darlin' is the child abducted/freed by The Woman at the end of that film--raised now to be a knowing, hilarious miniature doppelgänger of her guardian. At one point, McIntosh frames the two of them as they stand together surveying the wilderness, their enormous hair making them look like two pine trees in silhouette. It's one of several moments in the film where McIntosh's sense of humour gets free reign. A later scene set in a car as Nurse Tony tries to drive The Woman a few miles is the hardest I've laughed in any movie this year. (See, she's never been in a car.)

That attention to character and the humour and horror that derives from it is the motor driving Darlin'. McIntosh lards her picture with social issues, ranging from homophobia and its adjacent phobias in an early dialogue between Nurse Tony and his boss, The Bishop (Bryan Batt), to the big fat target that is the Catholic Church, seen here as not wanting to do good so much as wanting good publicity after decades (centuries?) of bad. One interesting side-effect of the Trump period is how Christian Evanglicism has been outed as a particularly dangerous and cult-like system of patriarchal control over female sexuality. McKee took aim at Evangelicals in The Woman, and McIntosh picks up the torch here; I kind of appreciate the movie's lack of subtlety in that respect, but there are times it slides into didacticism. Where Darlin' really soars is in the depth of its character detail. The young women at Darlin's orphanage, for instance (Mackenzie Graham, Lauren Ashley Carter, Maddie Nichols), are developed beyond one-line psych-ward descriptors. Their acceptance of Darlin' from pre-vocal hellion to the somehow-more-dangerous good Catholic schoolgirl has about it a surprising tenderness. When an evil nun provokes Darlin' during class, they distract the nun by acting out. They redirect the fire. When things start to fall apart for Darlin' as her cover story begins to unravel (and The Woman comes to collect her), what happens to them becomes as much a concern as what happens to Darlin'.

This is not to say that Darlin' isn't afflicted by some of the overreachings of a first film--more to say that McIntosh's intelligence, wit, and absolute willingness to "go there" are harbingers of a long and successful career behind the camera. When Darlin' is good, it's fantastic. I love how fully McIntosh inhabits The Woman: a scene where she slits the neck of her prey lingers on The Woman caressing her meat as it dies, while another follows a would-be rape victim rescued by The Woman's intervention, walking off as her attacker is murdered, too shocked to be overly surprised by her deliverance. There are volumes in the margins of this film about a woman's trauma. Sister Jennifer (Nora-Jane Noone), the Bishop's lead nurse in charge of Darlin's rehabilitation, agrees to help because she sees in Darlin' something of her own abandonment and crisis of faith. Indeed, Darlin' revels in women and other oppressed minorities asserting themselves "naturally" in opposition to the expression of masculine "nature." Boys will be boys, but watch your ass when girls decide to be girls. This is a deliberately triggering family drama, then, about the importance of growing wild in a world dedicated to pruning and fencing--and about finding your own when your blood proves corrupted by the trappings of the world. Living life as a wolf instead of in the imitation of a sheep. Darlin' is groovy. Programme: Selection 2019