Movie Review: Girl Asleep

Puberty’s hell, even without the demons. Greta (Bethany Whitmore) has to deal with both in the spunky Australian flight-of-fancy Girl Asleep.

Rosemary Myers’ feature debut is a charming coming-of-age story about a teenager who wishes age wasn’t coming quite so quickly.

Greta’s family wants her to hold a 15th birthday party, but the current 14-year-old would rather hold onto her innocence a little while longer instead. In the safe confines of prepubescence, she can ignore her parents’ crumbling marriage, evade the romantic advances of best (and only) friend Elliott (Harrison Feldman) and escape the fate of her boy-crazy sister, Genevieve (Imogen Archer).

When her mother (Amber McMahon) and father (Matthew Whittet) take matters into their own hands and surprise Greta with a shindig, she’s confronted by a declaration of love from Elliot and a ceremonial shaming by a three-headed hydra of mean girls (led by the deadpan Maiah Stewardson). In a tizz, Greta passes out and escapes into a make-believe world where her burgeoning womanhood is realised as a descent into the wilderness, and where sexually deviant monsters and frigid witches reside.

Written by Whittet and adapted by Myers from her own theatrical production (staged in Adelaide’s Windmill Theatre), Girl Asleep is a dryly funny take on reluctant adulthood, bolstered by some of the most striking DIY-fantasy imagery this side of Where the Wild Things Are.

The 1970s setting allows Myers to clothe her cast in gaudy, eye-popping pastels; combined with the precise, obsessively symmetrical framing of cinematographer Andrew Commis and the intricately manicured set dressing, the Wes Anderson comparisons are hard to ignore.

Same goes for the influence of The Mighty Boosh, that oddball BBC comedy in which the leads would disappear and then re-appear dressed as op shop-styled sea creatures and crack foxes. Greta’s family undergoes a similar transformation in the third act’s excursion into her sleepy subconscious.

Whitmore’s grounded, sometimes shell-shocked performance anchors all the nuttiness (even as dance breaks intermittently interrupt proceedings), while Feldman offers a sweet, over-talkative counterpoint as Elliott (also dealing with his own identity crisis).

Girl Asleep wears its inspirations on its sleeve, but that’s where you’ll find its heart too, and it’s a big one.

4/5

Girl Asleep arrives in WA cinemas September 1. It opens nationally on September 8. Rated M for mature themes and coarse language.