“The Starling Girl” doesn’t always hold our attention, mainly due to an occasionally shaggy pace that forgets we’re often ahead of the plot. It’s a vibe captured well in the edgy, dead-eyed propriety in Schmidt’s portrayal of Jem’s mother, but also in the troupe dancers who casually police Jem’s choreography suggestions. But Parmet’s less interested in cultish dread than a more naturalistic dullness of isolation and groupthink you’d find in any closed conservative society where women of faith have been sold a purity narrative. We’ve come to expect a visually eerie serenity from stories set in cloistered worlds of punishing piety (think “Martha Marcy May Marlene” and “Midsommar”).

But Owen is no less fascinating, Pullman’s sharp turn pinned to where dissatisfaction leads the weak-willed (which could also be applied to Jem’s dad, and Simpson’s ultrafine portrayal of a wrecked born-again addicted to the fumes of his old life). When vanity is the catch-all accusation in her circle for the blasphemy of pleasure, what’s a naturally self-expressive person to do?īecause we’re seeing everything through Jem’s eyes - cinematographer Brian Lannin creating an almost vérité-documentary rigor on that front - patriarchy’s sinister hold feels ever-present, and Scanlen is excellent at the minute-to-minute thrill and agony of a situation that’s educating her fast in human frailty. Which in Scanlen’s scintillatingly layered portrayal are a tangy, foreshadowing mix of devotional guilt and hurt feelings.

It’s a fragile happiness, though, when after the high of a performance she’s scolded for her sin-adjacent dancewear (a not-thick-enough dress top), and immediately needs to find some privacy so she can flush out some tears. In writer/director Laurel Parmet’s impressively nervy feature debut “The Starling Girl,” a devout 17-year-old in a fundamentalist Christian community begins to notice the divide between her increasingly bold sense of self and the well-policed demands of her insular, tightknit church, a quiet struggle made even more pronounced with the sudden kindling of desire.Īn obliging daughter, helpful sister to her younger sibs and joyful member of her church’s troupe of “worship dancing” young women, Jem Starling ( Eliza Scanlen) lives to glorify God, and, equally, loves to show it through dance. Sowing doubt in one’s agency has always been an insidiously formidable weapon. One of the greatest tools that authoritarian religious groups have to control congregants - especially women - is convincing them that their personality, their power, is a liability.

Eliza teoh books