Hellbender

I really want to like the gritty, DIY, indie spirit of this. I really want to appreciate the way this movie is constantly keeping the viewer off-kilter with cinematography, bizarre imagery, and surrealist sequences that you can’t tell if they’re reality or not. I really want to like threading a coming of age story to a young woman discovering she has a history of black magic in her family, and that she has innate abilities in said magic. I want to love the weird acting choices, the disturbing gore effects, the mysterious way witchcraft works in this world. But the people who made Hellbender forgot to actually tell a story with this movie. For 83 minutes, there is no real arc. The movie wants to build up a schism between Izzy (the daughter) and Mother as Izzy discovers she’s been cloistered for a dozen years based on a lie, and that her growing power is changing their relationship dynamics. It just … never does. It never feels like there’s any stakes. Izzy‘s response to finding out she’s been lied to for most of her life is to … lay her head in Mother’s lap? Mother’s response to finding out her daughter has been killing people and eating them for power is to … play with toy cars with her? Every time there’s some development that should widen the gap between them, they’re playing in their two-person band minutes later, or snuggling, or eating dinner. You can try to chalk it up to Izzy trying to downplay the changes she’s going through, and Mother trying to bury her head in the sand, but the movie never communicates any escalation of stakes, so it all feels flat and pointless. So, what you’re left with is a movie that has everything it needs to be a fascinating take on growing up, but never actually does anything with it. It’s pretty, it’s weird, but it’s all in service of a movie that has the emotional range of a doormat.