Friday, 16 September 2022

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #309: Electrick Children (2013).

 

Rachel McKnight (Julia Garner) has just turned 15 and is a member of a Mormon group in rural Utah so fundamentalist they're borderline Amish. One night she listens to a cassette player for the first time and hears a cover of the song "Hanging on the Telephone." Her more obedient brother Mr. Will (Liam Aiken) confiscates the player now, saying it is only to be used for God's purposes, but when Rachel then discovers she is pregnant, she believes she has conceived miraculously like the Virgin Mary, through the cassette player. Once their parents inevitably find out, Mr. Will is blamed for impregnating Rachel and asked to leave the community and Rachel is told she will entered into a shotgun marriage the next day at the insistence of her father Paul (a jarringly miscast Billy Zane). That's when she flees to Las Vegas with an initially unsuspecting Mr. Will, who's asleep in the back of the family's truck in which she drives there. Once they arrive in Vegas, Rachel is all about freedom and adventure while Mr. Will tries to make her return home before reluctantly giving in, and then they meet Clyde (Rory Culkin) and his gang of skater mates, who broaden both Rachel's and Mr. Will's horizons.

This 2013 debut from writer-director Rebecca Thomas, who herself was raised Mormon, initially shows promising signs of subversion and originality, but then increasingly indulges in tameness and a flurry of coming-of-age narrative cliches. Rachel and Mr. Will's Vegas adventures see them (involuntarily, in Mr. Will's case) explore sex and substance abuse, but themes like that don't alone make a movie daring IMO and especially not when they're depicted in such a tactful but soft-core manner. There's also very little humour here to spice it up and not enough of a contemporary music soundtrack to add energy to it. Garner gives a beautifully dignified and balance performance as Rachel and Aiken adequately makes Mr. Will the grounding, centrifugal force to her closet wild child, but Culkin really doesn't have much to do as the token unrefined love interest.

Maybe it was meant to be somewhere between wholesome and provocative, but it just didn't get that balance right and it certainly didn't feel fresh or imaginative to me. Electrick Children did not inject me with a shock. 6/10.

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