{"id":2479,"date":"2012-10-18T13:43:51","date_gmt":"2012-10-18T12:43:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/?p=2479"},"modified":"2012-10-18T13:43:51","modified_gmt":"2012-10-18T12:43:51","slug":"beasts-of-the-southern-wild","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/2012\/10\/18\/beasts-of-the-southern-wild\/","title":{"rendered":"Beasts of the Southern Wild"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Beasts of the Southern Wild<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n

\nFormat:<\/B> Cinema

\nDates:<\/B> 19 October 2012

\nVenues:<\/B> Key cities

\nDistributor:<\/B> Studiocanal

\nDirector:<\/B> Benh Zeitlin

\nWriters:<\/B> Lucy Alibar, Benh Zeitlin

\nCast:<\/B> Quvenzhan\u00e9 Wallis, Dwight Henry, Levy Easterly

\nUSA 2012

\n93 mins
\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Hushpuppy (Quvenzhan\u00e9 Wallis) is a little black girl who lives with her daddy, Wink (Dwight Henry), in the Bathtub, a small, ramshackle Louisiana riverside township of rundown rummies, long-in-the-tooth hippies and out-and-out outsiders. This is the community of the other, the one that doesn\u2019t think of itself as a victim even as it falls off the map: hell, it doesn\u2019t even enter into Mitt Romney\u2019s 47%. They live on the margins in the wetlands, happy to be forgotten and left alone, but the world is changing and Hushpuppy dreams of terrifying giant hogs, old creatures that will be released by the melting ice of the Arctic and will descend on their community, destroying everything in an end-of-days stampede. <\/p>\n

Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild<\/i> caused a great deal of critical buzz after its premiere at Sundance followed by its entry in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, and the praise was amply justified. Zeitlin\u2019s film approaches a section of society that is often generically ghettoised in worthy social realism. His mixing of poverty with a rich strain of dark Gothic fantasy does have some problems, but the exhilaration of a film that refuses to tick the usual boxes and prefers to follow the chaotic breathless journey of its main character and narrator is well worth the ride. Hushpuppy herself is an admixture of Huck Finn, Pippi Longstocking and Dennis the Menace; she\u2019s an ASBO Alice in Wonderland, but all that said, she\u2019s also herself, a perfectly original angry unique little girl. She lives near her dad Wink \u2013 but crucially not with him \u2013 but Wink is ailing. Along with the awakening Lovecraftian aurochs, there\u2019s a very real storm brewing and flood is coming, and Wink\u2019s wrung out body is at the wrong end of a lifetime of alcohol and neglect. Hushpuppy makes sense of her own dilemma on her own; she draws her own history of the universe on the walls of her shack; tends to her animals and communicates with her long-lost mother, who she now feels she must find if everything is going to be alright. She even attends school occasionally, but, being Bathtub, it isn’t exactly a Michael Gove-approved academy. \u2018You are all meat,\u2019 the teacher tells her wards \u2013 that is, when she’s not preparing voodoo medicine.<\/p>\n

The music, cinematography, the sense of place, and the wonderful narration Hushpuppy provides \u2013 \u2018The world belongs to us. It was made for us\u2019 \u2013 creates a bold, challenging vision and, although moving, the film never descends into mawkishness. It never asks for sympathy \u2013 \u2018No tears,\u2019 Wink shouts at Hushpuppy. However, there is a danger that in the fireworks (quite literally at times) and the yelling and whoops of celebration as well as the millennial excitement and dread, the film might remain oddly comforting. Hushpuppy\u2019s empowerment seems a part of the fairy tale skeleton of the plot. A corrective might be Roberto Minervini\u2019s Low Tide<\/i>, which premiered at Venice this year, and which tells a very different story of a child\u2019s resilience in the face of awful parental neglect. The two films would make for an interesting double bill. <\/p>\n

That said, Hushpuppy\u2019s mission is really to stand alone. And this is a film that weaves its fascinating magic and leaves all other questions for another time. <\/p>\n

John Bleasdale<\/B><\/I><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Benh Zeitlin’s exhilarating film mixes poverty with a rich strain of dark Gothic fantasy.
\nReview by John Bleasdale<\/B><\/I><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,1],"tags":[65,503,442],"class_list":["post-2479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-check-it-out","category-cinema-releases","tag-american-independent-film","tag-outsiders","tag-southern-gothic"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","wps_subtitle":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/purUP-DZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5722,"url":"http:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/2015\/09\/03\/buttercup-bill\/","url_meta":{"origin":2479,"position":0},"title":"Buttercup Bill","author":"Pam Jahn","date":"September 3, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"A dark, ambiguous Southern tale of cruel, murky love. 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