Beasts of the Southern Wild

An independent movie is quite often an invitation to see a new view of the world or an aspect of the world. Let's take for example The inhabitants of The Bathtub, a community somehow separated from the rest of the Union and that most probably would be located somewhere in Louisiana. This forgotten place is inundated by poverty and its dwellers do not have a future, they just live life one day at a time. Hushpuppy is a five-year-old girl who lives in a place not too far from her father's. Her father is the most faithful representative of The Bathtub: unemployed, and a hot-tempered drunk man called Wink whose wife, Hushpuppy's mother, left long ago.  It is Hush Puppy's voice who leads the viewer through the movie, who describes the mythical Aurochs that her teacher told existed in the Artic frozen but who are coming back because of Global Warming and who witnesses how a storm comes and ends up the ideal life of the community. The survivors try to return things to what they were before but fail and are forced to go to a shelter in a hospital. There it is revealed that Wink is about to die. The villagers escape only to encounter that the Aurochs have arrived from the Artic. The only one brave enough to face them is Hush Puppy who discovers they are no threat. They are just passing by and in this case retreating from The Bathtub. The girl then enters the room where Wink is now agonizing and sees him die. It is her who prepares the funerals for her father, Bathtub-style, which means the body is sent in a floating board covered in clothes down or up the river.

The girl (Quvenhazné Wallis) is a great rol to interpret and being her sure was a challenge for Quvenhazné and "her father" , Wink (Dwight Henry) does a good job when impersonating  the unstable but still resposible parent and prepares his little daughter for a world of simple but also very hard ways. The fantasy dsiplayed in the events is at moments unique and therefore it puts this film in the genre of fantasy alone, and not as another bad copy.

It is an entertaining film, not necessarily for all the family though, and which was also nominated for four academy awards among them one for Best Actress for Quvezhané (now the youngest nominée ever for that category) which was finally given to Jennifer Lawrence. 

Four out of five for this one.