Saint Clare (2023)
Writer-director Mitzi Peirone impressed with her debut feature – the stylised, formally daring Braid. Her follow-up, based on Don Roff’s novel Clare at Sixteen and co-written by Guinevere Turner (Go Fish, American Psycho – oh, and Bloodrayne), is more accessible but just as skilful. Saint Clare marks Peirone as a name to watch.
Clare Bleecker (Bella Thorne) is an unusual schoolgirl – steeped in fantasies of Catholic martyrdom, but a practiced vigilante who preys on serial killers. In a hallucinatory origin story, we see she once saved her guide troupe from a stereotype bearded thug and came home bloody to Mama – who protected her, but has since died. Now living with her actress/stoner cool grandmother (Rebecca DeMornay) in a small town, Clare lives like a regular high-school hottie with a small friend group and involvement with the theatre club. A visionary camp director (Joel Michaely, doing more with the stereotype than Jim Rash in Fly Me to the Moon) is putting on a gender-flipped production of Ira Levin’s Deathtrap with Clare in the lead (to understand some later developments in the plot, it helps if you know the play – or Sidney Lumet’s film).
Early on, Clare waits at a bus stop though the bus isn’t running and an obviously sketchy guy (Bart Johnson) offers her a lift with a wealth of not-a-good-sign signals she coolly notes – and when he tries to get her to drink from a drugged flask, she puts some serious counter-moves on him. She is haunted or imagines she’s haunted by a mailman (Frank Whaley) who died in her presence but crucially isn’t one of her victims – but also isn’t the dead mother she’d prefer to be haunted by. Thorne and Whaley are terrific in well-written oddball exchanges which serve to comment on Clare’s peculiar heroic journey even as she gets into a plot full of mushrooming complications – a local detective (Ryan Philippe) is leery of her alibi, her co-star (Erica Dasher – very funny) is weirdly hot and cold and her recent best friend (Joy Rovarts) is added to a long list of girls who have vanished in the locality.
The ghost tells Clare that the shady driver wasn’t acting alone – Johnson comes back as the first perv’s longer-haired, equally skeevy twin brother – and Clare uses her acting skills to set herself up as bait – she’s hilarious as a dimwit bubblehead just begging to be abducted – and expose a conspiracy which involves culprits who are slightly foreshadowed in order to pull some surprises later in the day. Peirone doesn’t stage things in the obvious way, which often tends to put familiar plot licks in a different light – Clare is a killer killer in the mode of The Punisher or Dexter (or Abigail Breslin in Final Girl) and we’re on her side, but it doesn’t take a dead mailman to make us realise she’s also completely barmy and her visions (in one, she’s Joan of Arc at the stake) inform the way the film looks and feels. Thorne – of the Babysitter movies and Assassination Nation, plus (ahem) Amityville: The Awakeing and Boo! A Madea Halloween – is terrific; I’d kind of like to see more of that version of Deathtrap with her and Dasher in the Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve roles.
Discussion
No comments yet.