With the sky soon to fall under the weight of Bond, it seems strangely perfect that a film narrated from the perspective of a feisty six-year-old from 'The Bathtub' should pull us with a mighty, unrelenting, "thump" back to earth. With a Pan's Labyrinth-esque air of fantasy which entangles the imagination of a child with the dark depths of the reality in which they live, the film gains it's momentous strength from the way in which it's young protagonist, 'Hushpuppy', handles with great ferocity the collapsing world around her.
The carnal world of 'The Bathtub'- a patch in the marshy Louisiana Lowland- which is under the ominous possibility of flooding, becomes the startling, unnerving, yet heart-warmingly endearing, soil from which the film burgeons with monstrous power. It is a film in which the characters and the world around them are inextricably linked- survival of one depends on survival of the other. The story line tumbles out of the screen in the most unpredictable of fashions, continuously drenching the stunned audience with loose music and stark images until we are left at the closing credits finally seeing through hindsight the film's puzzle-like cohesiveness.
This is a brilliant journey of survival, made all the more adventurous by the raw innocence of the perspective from which it is told. Go sea it.
--A.G.
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