Review: HELLBENDER

Someone's gittin' hunged out thayr in the mountains. It looks like the 19th century. The accused isn't dying, even when shot in the head. Instead the figure blasts off, soaring into the sky as a kind of humanoid fireball. Ten a face with a worried look. Was she dreaming this? Maybe but the day's started to time to get up and play some gothy metal with the daughter. When mum announces she's going into town from their mountain retreat she asks if daughter Izzy wants anything. Drumsticks. Later, Izzy goes on a hike along the local watercourse and comes across a stranger who's lost in the woods. They have a stilted conversation during which he wants to show her a photo he took with his phone of a strange symbol he came across. She stops him coming closer saying she's sick. Mum appears on the bank high above, tells Izzy to git home and deals with the stranger herself. The conversation goes to the same nowhere that the stranger ended up and she renders him into a scattering mass of ashes.

Hellbender is a film by a family called Adams (yes, they use the more famous order of those words but are still missing a 'd'). Everyone of them chips in on camera, writing, music, acting etc. with the help of a crew. This is their second feature. I haven't seen the first but judging by the skill with which this one avoids horror movie cliches I'm going to seek it out. The mother and daughter in this story are a real life mother and daughter and this tale of parent/child rifts forming and widening as the child grows and ventures progressively further away from the family idyll is the focus. The horror and the magic, when they appear, spring from this gravity which is how all that genre avoidance is done and feels so effortless.

Toby Poser's Mother (not given a name) offers a mountain woman wary of the world that snakes through the woods towards her daughter and will take recourse to dark forces (supported by some credible effects) Zelda Adams walks so lightly through her days she seems to glide. When she meets strangers (admittedly in a situation in which she is isolated within a remote location) she all but collapses into the vulnerability and powerlessness of a ten year old (she's about eighteen in the film). When she smiles at a joke or in a moment of parent/child warmth her face lights up with such a natural artless joy it almost makes you feel guilty to keep looking.

As the credits rolled on this enjoyable and enjoyably serious film I wondered what kind of film my family might have made if we'd tried anything like this. There were enough of us to fill the cast and crew of a Spielberg blockbuster but I think that, rather than this lean and elegantly drawn fable of a child learning her own powers, it would have been more like Hey Dad as a severe corporate training video. That the forces that put this together were from people more used to each other than on almost any other set in history and kept it so disciplined and single-voiced is a marvel. It is cine-literate without being childishly referential. It is warm without being maudlin. It offers clean pitch on the pain and euphoria of change.

It is on Shudder.