Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012, USA)

I’ve got to be honest—I HATE the word “lyrical” applied to film. It’s become such a reviewer’s crutch in the past decade, one that I have succumbed to using on more than one occasion. But I’ll hang up my issues for once, because despite mulling it over for several days now, I just can’t think of a better word to describe Beasts of the Southern Wild. If Beasts had been adapted for the screen, it wouldn’t surprise me if the original work were a long-form poem or loose performance piece, something akin to Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf (I refuse to be like Tyler Perry and take the guts out of that title). Beasts may not always make sense, but that could be said of a lot of poems, too, and despite the amount of science fiction/fantasy I read and watch, I haven’t encountered a fictional world that feels this real in some time.