London Film Festival: My Skinny Sister & Take Me to the River

Our take on two impressive debut features at London Film Festival centred on teen protagonists, My Skinny Sister and Take Me to the River.

Feature by Rachel Bowles | 19 Oct 2015

My Skinny Sister

My Skinny Sister (★★★) is the first film from Swedish writer-director Sanna Lenken, whose own experience with eating disorders also informed her successful short Eating Lunch, a prequel of sorts to this feature-length debut.

We follow the trials of bulimic teenage ice skater Katja (Amy Diamond) as seen through the viewpoint of her younger sister, Stella (Rebecka Josephson – granddaughter of Erland Josephson, author and frequent muse of Bergman and Tarkovsky). With a mixture of awe and jealousy, Stella regards her older sister as an idol to be emulated, trying on her exorbitantly expensive figure skater dress, practicing (and failing) at skating and jogging, and writing unrequited love poems to Katja’s middle-aged trainer, Jacob (Maxim Mehmet.)

It’s through Stella’s innocent, intelligent and inquisitive eyes that with creeping dread we realise the extent of Katja’s eating disorder. Stella comes across Katja binging on crisps from the dustbin, peaks in through the toilet door to see her sister purging and witnesses her fainting on the ice.

Coupled with Katja’s nose bleeds and increasingly panicked behaviour around family meals, My Skinny Sister conveys one of the most accurate portrayals of bulimia on screen, and touches on an even lesser known phenomenon, the almost viral-like quality of eating disorders to spread to those around the sufferer, with Stella scrutinising herself in the mirror, losing body confidence and refusing food like her tortured sister.

This strength is also Lenken’s film’s weakness, however. By focusing on the antagonistic love/hate relationship between the sisters and its effects on Stella, Katja’s characterisation, and that of her parents, is diminished. What we gain in insight to Stella’s attitudes towards her changing body and society’s obsessions with it, we lose in the hows and whys of Katja’s bulimia, her motivations and her experiences. By My Skinny Sister’s denouement, Katja is little more than an object in Stella’s character development.

Despite this flaw, My Skinny Sister is a strong first effort and will leave audiences excited for what Lenken and her two young leads may have to offer in the future.

Notes from the Twitteratti:

Take Me to the River 

Matt Sorbel’s first feature film proves a tense, clever debut, consistently shifting tone and defying genre expectations at every turn. Through a slowly unravelling narrative, Take Me to the River (★★★★) manages to maintain suspense for its entire 84 minutes, juggling comedy, dread, horror and tragedy, while never losing its naturalistic style (there is no nondiegetic music until the credits roll) or commitment to complex characterisation.

Young out and proud teenager Ryder (Logan Miller) accompanies his liberal parents for a dreaded family reunion, swapping the laidback lifestyle of California for the rather more austere and conservative Nebraskan countryside. Returning to the farm where she grew up, Ryder’s mother, Cindy (Robin Weigert), asks Ryder to hide his sexuality and exasperatedly states that “this is not about you,” as Ryder rolls his eyes. 

Cleverly, this line and Sorbel’s cut to Ryder’s expression seems to signpost Ryder’s sexuality and identity as central to the film; that Take Me to the River will be a coming of age tale and perhaps a culture clash comedy and family drama.  However, if we scratch below the surface of Cindy’s homophobic microagression in the name of family unity, her seemingly selfish request conceals a dark secret, one that hangs over the heads of Ryder and Cindy throughout like the sword of Damocles.

Sorbel used the farm he grew up on for shooting and it shows, he manages to at once capture a bucolic, idyllic countryside that is as suffocating as it is beautiful. Massive fields of corn show the inescapable, stifling conformity of this pastoral setting; the picturesque meadows that Ryder gets lost in on horseback are as unforgiving and difficult to traverse as the film’s narrative and tone is for its audience. And the eponymous river, like its flowing, babbling water, is a constantly shifting site of joy, trauma and danger.  

The cast impresses: Josh Hamilton is skin-crawlingly creepy as Uncle Keith, Cindy’s hot tempered, gun wielding brother, by turns terrifying, comical and almost sympathetic; Weigart expertly plays Robin as a woman desperately trying to hold her family together while herself coming undone at the seams; and the young Ursula Parker is convincingly childlike as Molly, Keith’s daughter and Ryder’s doting niece.

Sorbel has revealed that he directed every actor separately so that each character is completely sure of their interpretation and experience of events, past and present, and this methodical approach translates into an emotionally complex narrative with a multitude of explanations, bound to leave audiences scratching their heads long after they leave the cinema.

Notes from the Twitteratti:

London Film Festival ran 7-18 Oct

My Skinny Sister is released 27 Nov by Matchbox Films