The Zellner brothers’ KID THING is promoted as a “fever dream fable”, though for all its Grimm sensibility, it will ring true to anyone who has known a lonely farm kid, isolated from society and alienated from its own family. Annie (Sydney Aguirre) lives with her stumbling dumb-ass father, Marvin (Nathan Zellner) on a farm in Texas. Marvin means well but has left his daughter to raise herself. Annie is a tough, cynical little person who has grown up in a world where she must make her own amusement and internalise any emotional turmoil for want of parental guidance.
The golden, agrarian life shown in the opening scenes is beautifully rendered, but if you’re looking for nostalgia, you’ll find the Zellner brothers’ blue remembered hills are unsentimental, down and dirty. The camera remains at child-height: pottering after Annie, peering over her shoulder or offering her own point of view, reminding us how fascinating the world can be from a few feet further down. Tableaux of litter, farmyard corpses, a blind spot in the grocery store where shoplifting is a cinch – Annie’s world is the real deal. She asks her father for nothing more than money, and sticks rows of day-glo price tags to his sweaty, sleeping pate with something approaching affection. Marvin’s daughter is a strange, epicene kid-thing, neither baby nor adult, and he finds it difficult to communicate with such an inscrutable, grave child. He spends much of his time sharing mumbled private jokes with his best buddy Caleb (David Zellner), perpetuating our empathy with Annie, as the only adult conversation in the film is flattened into a “Peanuts” style garble.
Tableaux of litter, farmyard corpses, a blind spot in the grocery store where shoplifting is a cinch – Annie’s world is the real deal.
When the cries from the well first break through Annie’s small, solipsistic world, Annie is excited: she finally has someone with whom she can share her walkie-talkie set. Refusing to allow her new friend Esther (voiced by the late, great Susan Tyrell) to escape, she scampers home and tents herself in bedding with a torch in the age-old tradition of children staying up after lights-out – the scene is extra poignant when one considers that her father does not care whether or when she goes to bed. Esther’s wild fury excites Annie into a rage, and her new friend becomes a “wicked witch”, representing the adult authority Annie rebels against on the rare occasion that she encounters it. But Esther is just as quickly forgiven, and the strange intimacy they have built becomes a lodestone for Annie, who begins to wonder if Esther can offer her some kind of escape route.
KID THING is far more mature and moral than the brothers’ earlier work, and is carried very well by a lead actress who gives us so much to watch…
The Zellner brothers are best known for the Sundance favourite GOLIATH, an idiosyncratic “lost cat” themed tale, and their preposterous “lost prepuce” themed short AFTERMATH ON MEADOWLARK LANE. With KID THING they strive to avoid sentimentality and to authentically recreate the beauty and horror of childhood. KID THING is far more mature and moral than the brothers’ earlier work, and is carried very well by a lead actress who gives us so much to watch – her cold, semi-feral fury dissipating during moments of private reverie when it becomes clear that all she craves is hope, the promise of something better.
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