'Horse Girl': Saddle Up
After a brief hiatus for the too-hot summer, I decided I would leap right back into the thick of things by tackling my IMDb watchlist. There was only one problem. My IMDb watchlist is a cluttered mess. Scrolling through it and looking for something to see could leave me with a campy romance, a tense horror or something more cerebral. For that reason, Netflix’s Horse Girl managed to sneak up on me a little. I saw the run time. I saw Alison Brie (a Community cast member who seemed effortlessly funny on the show but who I was pleasantly surprised to discover had a powerful ability in dealing with dramatic and emotional moments through her voice work on Bojack Horseman). I clicked play with no real expectations, even gliding past the little description that Netflix leaves. I think in some ways that that helped with how I absorbed the movie, and how it affected me. If Horse Girl is anything, it is a character study of Sarah (played by Alison Brie).
The start of the movie sets up the character of Sarah and immediately makes her sympathetic - she is a loner who stays in, and the only friend it seems she really connects with is her coworker who knew her mother and is twice her age. After work, she goes to see the horse that she used to ride and passive-aggressively critiques the performance of the horse’s current young owner. She stays in and makes anklets and obsessively watches a supernatural crime show that is an obvious nod to programmes like Lucifer and Buffy. Her roommate clearly cares for her, but their interactions seem awkward and stilted and lack any real connection. Alison Brie gives a stellar performance, the best I’ve seen from her, and is convincingly off putting and uncomfortable. She co-wrote the film with director Jeff Baena, and the writing is super tight and feels very authentic. The scatterbrained outcast could have been done in an over-the-top and kitschy way but she always feels genuine and doesn’t push it too far outside of the realm of possibility. If the audience could see less of themselves in Sarah then she would not be such a tragic character and the rest of the film might not work as well as it does. I think it would fall in on itself under the weight of the uneasy places that the plot goes.
After a happy birthday spent drinking too much and making strangers uncomfortable, Sarah has a terrifying and surreal dream. She sees some strangers lying beside her in a white room with a view of some glowing stairs in the ocean. It is in these moments, these flashes of Sarah’s created reality, that the film is at its strangest and strongest. From there Sarah unravels slowly, while we learn more about her life - her unhealthy crush on a boy she met once, her distant and wince-inducing relationship with her father, her mother’s life and death dealing with schizophrenia. The pieces start to fit together, but director Baena never spells it out or treats the audience like they are stupid. Is Sarah really being abducted by aliens? Or is she suffering from a mental breakdown and her theories are really psychotic ramblings?
It is hard to watch as her symptoms become more varied and extreme. One particular scene impressed me with how far it was willing to go; Sarah walks away from her roommate, fleeing into the bathroom and finds herself suddenly at her work and completely naked in a kind of trance. There is a pause, as if the whole scene is holding its breath, and then she explodes into tears and panic. It continues to push itself into almost Lynchian territory with the same character played by multiple actors while Sarah tries to hold it together and make sense of the disturbing things that are happening to her. Alison Brie makes these changes believable and upsetting to watch. I found myself locked between wanting to avert my eyes and looking on unflinching in horror. This is undoubtedly one of the strongest representations of mental illness ever put to film.
That, though, is where my small criticism of the film rears its ugly head. It feels like, in trying to make the ending of the film ambiguous the message is muddled slightly. There are moments that are properly chilling. Sarah brings a date to a graveyard to dig up her grandmother because he went along with her conspiracy talk over dinner. Her enthusiasm about this mission and her grin and her assertion that she must be a clone of her grandma. It is powerful stuff. But the symptoms of whatever Sarah is experiencing (blackouts, violent outbursts, psychoses and hallucinations) are made less upsetting and more curious by the idea that it could all be the fault of some all powerful aliens that are terrorising a select few ‘clone people’. We see her abducted at the end of the film and it is left up to the viewer. Was she a very sick individual who was destroyed by schizophrenia? Or was the ending sequence - where she finally gets to kiss her crush, who then becomes the lead detective from her TV show and then vanishes - real, and a result of alien realities and visions?Writing it out, it seems obvious that Brie’s character is unwell. But the film is so fresh and well done that it seems plausible that the aliens really did take her. And maybe that is the point of this new voice in film - shining a light on an inability to discern life from delusion. I will be watching Horse Girl again, and if you have Netflix I wholeheartedly recommend it… although be ready for a wild ride.
Let me know what you think of Horse Girl and this review! If you want to hear more from me, or throw something at me to review then leave a comment or follow me on Twitter @pastadeficit . Thank you!