Ella Taylor reviews Beasts of the Southern Wild, a film which “racked up a total of four major awards and a storm of press attention” at Sundance and Cannes. It focuses on “Hushpuppy, a motherless bayou waif living on the edge of multiple disasters” in “the Bathtub, a fictional wasteland on the wrong side of the tracks and the levee.”
“Zeitlin, a transplanted New Yorker and the son of two folklorists, wants us to experience Beasts as a fairy tale in a tradition reaching back to Grimm by way of Maurice Sendak. Tricked out in a palette of rich browns and oranges, the film is a mesmerizing hellhole of magical realism, complete with a pack of wild beasts played by local hogs in headdresses, who may turn out to be friend or foe.”
