There’s more than one enigmatic, isolated, and broody character in this illusively hairline feature debut from Jonas Alexander Arnby. The focus may be on 16-year-old Marie (Sonia Suhl, debuting as well), an ethereal outsider experiencing what might be called a second puberty.
But the desolate fishing village that serves as her home, illuminated by the full moon, has an eerie antagonism all its own. Wooden shacks set close against the sea as if for protection and narrow bike trails fuse with the overcast sky to create a moodscape somewhere between heaven and hellish. It’s less teenage daydream than nightmare, but Niels Thastum’s achingly evocative cinematography and Mikkel Hess’s equally restive score render what could have been just another lycanthropic outlier into something far more rare: an honest portrait of a young person at odds with not only themselves but the entire community in which they live. That said, Footloose this isn’t.
Comparisons to Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In are difficult to avoid; When Animals Dream couples a similar transformative romance to blood and interspecies fear, but does so at an even more frigid and dread-inducing rate. (Screen both films back-to-back and you have a far superior riff on the goofy Twilight franchise.)
The less said about Rasmus Birch’s painfully excellent, slow-burn plot the better, but Suhl’s richly detailed performance is a genuine knockout and as shockingly truthful as a lunar eclipse.
Marie shares her life with her father (Lars Mikkelsen, brother of Mads) and her invalid mother (Sonja Richter). The specifics of mater familias’s ailment are only slowly revealed, and at that never fully articulated. We learn that the illness is genetic and apparently passed down from mother to daughter, but the smart scriptwork keeps the “W” word from ever being mentioned. Not so the young love, or lust, or whatever it is, that enters Marie’s life when she take a job at the local fishery. Trapped in a cryptic seaside town that might as well have villagers with torches storming the local castle (instead, concrete bunkers, remnants from a Nazi-occupied past-life/death, loom crumbling on the rocky beachhead), Marie finds female empowerment of a different stripe when her body begins to undergo yet another righteous change. Viewers may view her as the victim up to a point, but the shattering final shot howls victory all the way.
When Animals Dream screens again Wednesday, Sept. 24, 3pm.
This article appears in September 19 • 2014.