The Fits

2015 movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: At a gym, a young girl transitions from spending time training for boxing to practicing with a dance team. Suddenly, the girls on the team start having seizures, and nobody knows why.

This is a thrilling debut from Anna Rose Holmer. It's also an impressive debut for the young actress at the center of the story--Royalty Hightower. Just watching her gradually--realistically and gradually--evolve as a dancer would be enough to win me over, but she's great throughout this. I loved watching the transformation of her dance-punching the most. There's a confidence to the performance, but there's also a fragility to the character that comes out in the performance. It's strong.

The direction is equally confident. Holmer is a director who knows exactly how she wants to tell her story and then tells her story exactly that way. The narrative is economical, not wasting any dialogue or shots at all. There's really not much dialogue at all in this, but the words that are used, especially in teh first half of this, really feel like they matter. Holmer isn't interested in giving all the answers here, and she's not really interested in the details of these characters outside of their experiences in the gym or community center or whatever it is. She utilizes space impressively, really knows how to shoot young Hightower, and even throws in a little magical realism at a time when it really works.

I really liked the score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans. It's haunting, even more haunting because its whining ambiance doesn't always match the action.