Movie Review: Girl

credit: Girl

It might not be a popular opinion, but there are movies in which Bella Thorne has played a rather unlikable character who is empowered and is otherwise kind of a miserable person that a lot of people don’t like for a reason. And yet, for all that, she happens to be looked up to by others as a strong and independent individual.

In Girl, however, Thorne does play someone that is antisocial and skilled at throwing a hatchet or an ax, but it’s not too far into the movie when one figures that she has a reason to be this way. When she arrives in a small, rundown shell of a town looking for her father, she ends up running afoul of the local sheriff, and another man that she notes is wearing her father’s watch.

Before the real trouble starts, she also finds her father’s home and finds that he’s already been killed, which was her goal in the first place as she was told by her mother that her father kicked them both to the curb, so to speak, and left them penniless and destitute. As the story shapes up, however, it becomes easier to start doubting her mother and her own conviction when it comes to her father. 

credit: Girl

The main character’s evolution from start to finish was interesting.

When the audience first meets Thorne’s character, she’s angry, driven, and apparently withdrawn from the world around her as she seeks to accomplish her one driving goal: to kill her father. From the age of 6, apparently, she and her mother were shunned by her father and forced to live on their own as he did his own thing. But as the movie goes on, it becomes easier to think that the father is not quite the devil that her mother has made him out to be and that she needs to eliminate the tunnel vision that has led her to this point.

It becomes obvious that her mother has been playing her for years and that she has been devoted to the idea that her father was a devil that needed to be taken out. Once she found out that her uncles, the sheriff, and the man that attacked her in the laundromat, were her mother’s brothers and that they had killed her father out of some old grudge that hadn’t been allowed to die. In short, she’d been fed a lie for years on end and had been turned against her father because of the bitter resentment her mother had held for so long. 

The villains were kind of generic, but they served their function. 

A grudge being held that long isn’t such a bad element to place in a story, but the villains of this tale, apart from the mother, were kind of a ho-hum pair that were just bad enough to be interesting but were otherwise kind of hard to get into since they didn’t really up the stakes that much.

On top of that, their efficiency wasn’t all that great since they were kind of campy to start with, and while the final confrontation with the sheriff was interesting, the fact is that they didn’t offer up much of a threat when the protagonist finally found her groove. It’s tough to criticize a villain sometimes unless they’re that horrible, but there are times when it’s necessary to state that while they’re doing their job, some actors are simply horrible. Thankfully that can’t be said with one hundred percent accuracy since the villains aren’t easy to dismiss. They’re not that great, but they work for what the movie is. 

credit: Girl

The realization that the mother was the real villain didn’t come as much of a shock. 

From the first conversation that occurred between Thorne’s character and her mother, it was kind of easy to tell that her mother was a fairly miserable woman and that whatever happened to her years before was likely just as much her fault as her husband’s. It doesn’t sound as though her father was a saint, but it is revealed that he wasn’t the devil she’d been raised to believe he was. That kind of balance was nice to see in this movie since it didn’t focus on the idea of her father being a good man, in fact, it positioned him as a faulty character who was at least trying to do something right while her mother was a bitter woman who wasn’t a devil either, just a misguided individual that had allowed a long-standing grudge to do far more damage than should have been allowed. 

Overall, this movie was kind of interesting. 

It’s fair to say that this movie was a mishmash of emotions since the main character was entirely set on committing murder in the beginning but ended up seeing that her emotions were carefully controlled by the end. While it’s not a perfect story, it’s definitely one that should get people thinking of how damaging one point of view can be when parents separate.