Beasts of the Southern Wild

Director Benh Zeitlin gives us a dreamy but strikingly immediate and frayed-at-the-edges, child’s-eye view of life on the margins of America. The child is six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), a tomboyish girl who lives with her erratic dad, Wink (Dwight Henry), in a remote and wild bayou region of Louisiana – a ramshackle, watery trailer community of hard-living waifs and strays.

Hushpuppy’s fears of the rising waters and her confused feelings about her parents (her dad is ill, her mum gone) mean that she slips into a world of imagination. If that still sounds gritty and grim, much of ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ consists of bursts of pure, naked emotion, and it cartwheels along at a cracking pace. It’s fleshy and mucky (and shot on grainy 16mm), but it’s also musical and colourful. There are hints that the story, with its levees, heavy weather, flooding and refugeecamp is taking place at the time of Hurricane Katrina. But this is a fairytale in which we regularly slip out of the real world and into another one inside an over-imaginative young child’s head.

But although the film has been praised by many and won a number of awards it has been criticised by others. We let you make up your own minds.