A feeling of isolation permeates My Animal. Shot in the tiny Northern Ontario town of Timmins in the middle of winter, this stylish queer werewolf film is surrounded on all sides by towering snowbanks – and the people aren’t much warmer. Heather (Bobbi Salvör Menuez) is an outcast among outcasts, a withdrawn teenager from a family of local pariahs who spends her time playing hockey with her brothers and her supportive dad Henry (Stephen McHattie), with whom she shares a monstrous secret.
Heather and Henry are werewolves, and live by a self-imposed regimen of sequestering themselves in locked bedrooms for the three days surrounding the full moon. Just to be safe, Henry shackles his daughter to her bed on the most dangerous nights so she can’t hurt anyone – or herself. Heather’s mom Patti (Heidi von Palleske) married into this curse, and copes with it by drinking herself into a resentful stupor. Her younger brothers Cooper (Charles F. Halpenny) and Hardy (Harrison W. Halpenny) have yet to show signs of the family condition, but are feral enough that it could happen once they hit adolescence.
But Heather has another secret as well. She’s attracted to women – an early scene sees her masturbating while watching a VHS tape of female wrestlers in the ring – which makes her even more different from everyone else. Then she meets Jonny (Amandla Stenberg), the new girl in town, who practices figure skating at the same ice rink where Heather hangs out in hopes of one day trying out for the local men’s hockey team. They bond quickly, and begin spending their evenings together doing what disaffected teenagers do in small towns: Doing donuts in icy parking lots and drinking stolen booze.
One night, Heather confesses her feelings to Jonny, and the two end up in bed together. As one might expect in their closed-minded provincial environment, this sets off a chain of complications, many of them involving Jonny’s piggish jock boyfriend Rick (Cory Lipman). Director Jacqueline Castel compounds the repression by setting the film in a vaguely defined retro environment: The wood paneling, tube TVs, and throbbing synth score from Boy Harsher’s Augustus Muller suggest the 1980s – but towns like Timmins are often a full decade behind the rest of the world, so it could be the ‘90s as well. Either way, this is pre-Matthew Shepard, and it is not safe for Heather to openly be herself on any level.
Castel enhances the lonely feeling of the film by placing Heather and Jonny in empty spaces framed from off-center angles. There never seems to be anyone around, and when rooms are full, the presence of humans is more threatening than reassuring. Heather’s fantasies – and her tastefully shot memories of her stolen night with Jonny – take place in a black void bathed in red, pink, and blue lighting. Much of the film is soaked with red: The carpet in Heather’s bedroom, the neon sign at the town’s only bar, Jonny’s lipstick, and the tail lights of cars on solitary back roads are all different shades of the color of blood, danger, and lust.
Castel got her start as a director working on music videos, and My Animal reflects that experience. This is a film that’s more about style and feeling than plot, and Castel makes extensive use of delirious POV shots in the Evil Dead mold, zooming through snowy woods at night from a wolf’s eye view. Interestingly, she also holds back on revealing Jonny’s lupine transformation as much as possible, underlining the metaphor by de-emphasizing the monster.
The sheer Canadian-ness of it all adds a novel element – Scott Thompson plays Jonny’s dad, giving both girls northern screen legends for fathers – and the chemistry between Menuez and Stenberg lends the movie a solid emotional core. (McHattie’s gruff paternal figure also lends the film some much-needed warmth.) If the story’s trajectory is undeniably familiar, that’s because the experiences of queer people in small towns tend to be depressingly similar. Like the full moon, these cycles of oppression and liberation keep coming around, again and again.
