Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) starring Quvenzhane Wallis, Dwight Henry. Six-year-old Hushpuppy (Wallis) and her father Wink (Henry) live in the "Bathtub" area of the Gulf Coast. It's an area that is highly vulnerable to being inundated by seawater, and life isn't made any easier by the extreme poverty of the inhabitants. At the same time, we see scenes of massive ice melting in the Arctic, and the melting of the ice releases prehistoric beasts known as aurochs. These beasts seem to play some kind of allegorical role in the film, but for the life of me I couldn't pin it down. They just appear every once in a while, running (apparently headed for the Bathtub and Hushpuppy). This is an extremely unpleasant film to watch, what with the shaky camera work and the repeated scenes of desperate poverty. The acting is good, but it's a little hard to judge what the point of the film is. The ending offers no hope for the future, only the coming of age of a little girl. There are some interesting settings in this movie, but overall it just didn't hang together for me. (Subtitles for the hearing-impaired are available on the disc, as well as closed captions.) Grade: B-