PLOT: A meek young woman (Alison Brie) working in a crafts store begins to lose her grip on reality.
REVIEW: Jeff Beana’s HORSE GIRL is a major step-up for the filmmaker, following his reliably silly Sundance entries THE LITTLE HOURS and LIFE AFTER BETH (alongside the underrated mumblecore-esque JOSHY). Pairing him with frequent leading lady Alison Brie, it’s a unique take on mental illness that should hit close to home for many. It certainly provides Brie with a meaty, character-driven role that allows her to stretch and is the kind of solid indie one hopes Netflix keeps making. It’s virtually the only platform where a film like this could still get made and seen by a wide audience.
Brie’s Sarah is an intriguing part for her. Effortlessly empathetic, Brie has always had an interesting presence, and sure enough, no matter how crazy her character gets throughout, she never loses our sympathy. Rather, it’s an occasionally frightening look at what it's like to have your sense of reality slowly snatched away from you, where, to a certain extent, you know you’re losing it but can’t help but go down the rabbit hole.
Beana does something interesting by taking us right into Sarah’s mindset. From the start, we know she’s an oddball, spending all of her nights at home obsessing over a cheesy drama called PURGATORY (with real-life procedural vets Robin Tunney and Matthew Gray Gubler as the stars of the show within the movie). That’s when she’s not pining over her former horse, which was sold out from under her after her wealthy step-father (Paul Reiser– in a small but surprisingly sympathetic role) left the family in the wake of her mom’s breakdown.
The trouble starts when Sarah starts having strange visions and déjà vu, leading her into the insane belief that she’s her late grandmother’s reincarnation, before getting even loopier ideas. All the while, she tries to go on with her life, getting into a tentative relationship with the shy roommate (John Reynolds) of her own roommate’s boyfriend. Meanwhile, her increasingly odd behavior, such as sleepwalking, scratching the walls and even showing up to work naked start to fray the few relationships she does have, including one with her roommate (Debby Ryan) and her kindly employer (Molly Shannon).
As crazy sounding as she gets, neither Beana nor Brie ever let you lose sympathy for Sarah’s plight. We know she’s sick, and in a daring move, for the last act, we experience the world wholly through Sarah’s fractured perspective, a unique approach to dealing with mental illness that has an unsettling, open-ended effect that will rub some the wrong way. It feels unusually honest – given that these types of movies always have big climaxes while in real life such an illness waxes and wanes. As a result, the movie takes on a surreal, dream-like quality, bordering on sci-fi, with the soundtrack by Josiah Steinbrick and Jeremy Zuckerman turning other-wordly and synthy. Overall, it works pretty well, even if the occasional surreal touches from the perspective of other characters feel a bit out of place, as if they couldn't make up their mind whether they were making a serious film about mental illness or a surreal, David Lynch-style mindf*ck.
While I’d hesitate to call HORSE GIRL a perfect film (it’s a touch uneven in terms of pacing) it’s still a unique, compelling piece of work that’s a showcase role for Brie and a sign of good things to come for Beana. Brie’s performance is up there with some of the stronger ones I saw out of Sundance this year (where this had its premiere) and proof that she’s the real deal and easily able to carry all sorts of material
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