The idea that monsters are an allegory for the human condition is just about as old as the ideas of monsters themselves. But we keep coming back to it because the human condition is full of monstrousness. And also movies where people bite each other are nifty.
Fantastical creatures like werewolves hold up a mirror to our own inner natures, revealing uncomfortable truths about our lusts, our shames, our hidden strengths, our hidden weaknesses. And when the makeup department has a decent budget, they look pretty cool, too.
And so it goes that Jacqueline Castel’s debut feature “My Animal” utilizes the werewolf mythology as our entryway for a queer coming-of-age tale. Bobbi Salvör Menuez (“Under My Skin”) stars as Heather, a young woman still living with her parents and two younger, twin brothers in a snowy town in Canada. She spends her days practicing hockey, even though the local coach doesn’t want any girls on his team, and she spends her nights masturbating to the Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling, except when the moon is full. Then she spends her nights shackled to her bed.
Yes, Heather is a queer werewolf in the 1980s. The film doesn’t do terribly much with its period setting except to justify why nobody has cell phones, and to show us that one episode of Shelley Duvall’s “Faerie Tale Theatre” where Roger Vadim directed Klaus Kinski and Susan Sarandon in “Beauty and the Beast,” an adaptation which owed a hell of a lot to Jean Renoir. That clip introduces early on the idea that love can save us from our monstrousness or transform us into a monster, but it’s a little unclear which path Heather takes, or even whether she’s the beauty or the beast in this scenario.
Heather meets Jonny, played by Amandla Stenberg (“Bodies Bodies Bodies”), at the local skating rink. Jonny is a figure skater who performs with her closeted father, played by Scott Thompson (“The Kids in the Hall”), and endures a pretty lousy relationship with her boyfriend Ricky (Cory Lipman, “Most Wanted”). But her conversations with Heather are warm, friendly and a little eccentric. Heather’s strange attempt to transform “I’ll give you eggs” into a sexy double entendre is the kind of moment that many, less secure teens would probably play over and over in their heads as they relived the embarrassment. But Heather not only gets away with it, she even uses it as fuel for a sexy dream sequence. Go Heather, go.
Heather wants to live a normal life, but she can’t, because a) she’s a werewolf, b) she’s queer in a homophobic society, and c) her mother is an alcoholic who embarrasses her in front of her friends. Under normal circumstances, she could be forgiven for wanting to lash out a bit, to push at her boundaries and to drop acid at a particularly nondescript casino. If it weren’t for the werewolf thing, that is. It’s easy to sympathize with her plight but hard not to take on the role of a disapproving parent when she pushes her luck on the night of the full moon and has to race home on foot at the last minute before she kills her friends.
Bobbi Salvör Menuez owns this movie. It’s a film driven almost entirely by their star-making performance because the allegory is a little perfunctory, and the plot is very thin. The idea of combining monsters with coming-of-age has been done many a time, but so has the idea of doing a coming-of-age without any monsters at all, so there’s no sense in complaining that “My Animal” isn’t the first to tackle the concept. It’s just a little frustrating that it doesn’t develop that concept very much beyond the basic premise.
And since the plot goes in some pretty expected directions, and culminates in events that underwhelm both as a coming-of-age tale and as a horror movie, it’s hard not to be left a little disheartened by this enterprise. Which is a shame, because so much of Jacqueline Castel’s film works. The stark, lonely cinematography from Bryn McCashin segues beautifully into hallucinogenic dream states and an alluring drug trip. The score by Augustus Muller is thrilling and evocative, one of the better retrowave throwbacks in recent memory. Menuez, Stenberg and their co-stars Stephen McHattie (“Nightmare Alley”) and Heidi von Palleske (“Rabid”) make a sinewy meal out of their roles.
But those elements doesn’t add up to a whole a lot. Heather and Jonny’s relationship seems destined for either storybook happiness or horrifying tragedy, and without revealing which way the film takes us, let’s just say it doesn’t offer much of a catharsis or even powerful ambiguity. The film’s conclusion lets some people off the hook for head-scratching reasons, from either a plot perspective or a thematic one. It’s almost as though the film spent so much time pushing the horror into the background that, when the time finally came to do something with it, nobody could find the danged thing anymore.
There’s so much to love abut “My Animal” that it’s genuinely frustrating to find at the end that it leaves one rather cold. The style is impressive, the performances are superb, and there’s nothing wrong whatsoever with the concept. But this movie shows us the allegory it’s come up with and then it kinda coasts on that, working as a pretty decent but formulaic coming-of-age drama, coming up a little short on the werewolf side of things, and leaving far too much unsaid.
“My Animal” makes its world premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.