In 1988, a teenage girl's life is thrown into chaos when her mother disappears.
The film could be described as uneven, but for the most part it’s fairly effective as a portrait of adolescence and sexual awakenings.
A more restrained effort from Araki than the headrush of Kaboom, there’s plenty of fun to be had in Eva Green’s Joan Crawford-esque turn as the vanished lady.
Misses the energy and vitality of Gregg Araki’s best work, but there’s more going on here than immediately meets the eye.
An absorbing portrait of a woman, Gregg Araki continues to play exquisite corpse with film form.
Rites-of-passage tale has a heartfelt quality.
The film falls to pieces at the end, but this is a watchable, well-acted drama, and Woodley gets better and better.
Uses the genre trappings to explore the way sexuality drives and damages people – which is an interesting idea, but one that’s sometimes hard to care about thanks to the film’s wildly inconsistent tone.
Designed to within an inch of its life, and possessed of an almost Lynchian visual sensibility, this dreamy/nightmarish weirdie finds Araki reining in his anarchic excesses with rewarding results, as his satirical sensuality reaps the benefits of a heavily orchestrated deadpan formality.
Glasgow Film Theatre, Glasgow from Friday March 6, 2015, until Thursday March 12, 2015. More info: http://www.glasgowfilm.org/theatre/
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