Ever since she was a baby, Anna (Bel Powley) grew up in a dark room in an isolated house built in the middle of the woods. She was under the care of her old Daddy (Brad Dourif) who never allowed her to go outside or else she would be eaten by the deadly "Wildling." One day, Daddy brought a gun into the room apparently to shoot Anna. However, he could not bear to do it, so he shot himself instead. Anna would how have to discover her true nature and her origins on her own.
This was a quiet little indie coming of age film. The atmosphere was relentlessly dark, fitting for the genre. The initial scenes of Daddy taking care of the child Anna were very uncomfortable to watch. To make things even more squeamish, when she hit adolescence, Daddy would inject "medicine" into her abdomen daily to suppress her monthly "illness." These disgusting scenes gave me a sick feeling, like I was watching a pedophile in action. I almost wanted to walk out.
When Anna was rescued after the shooting incident, the story took a turn from one bizarre topic into another. When she was discharged from the hospital, Anna lived with Sheriff Ellen Cooper (Liv Tyler) and her teenage brother Ray (Collin Kelly-Sordelet). As she got initiated into being a regular teenager, she would realize that she cannot really fit in because of something within her. We will discover eventually how Daddy got to become her guardian as a child and the reason why he wanted to keep her from reaching adolescence.
As Anna was discovering herself, there were some shocking scenes, especially that bloody one in the bathroom at the party and that one when one of the boys tried to get frisky with her. To fill in the blanks in Anna's history, the script conveniently had a character called the Wolf Man (James LeGros) who knew the secret backstory.
Bel Powley gave an empathetic performance as the confused Anna. Brad Dourif, once an Oscar acting nominee for film debut in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975), was uncomfortable to watch as Daddy. Seeing Liv Tyler play a sheriff will make you wonder whatever happened to her career.
Writer-director Fritz Böhm had an interesting and disturbing story to tell. The start was very interesting, reminiscent of "Room" (Lenny Abrahamson, 2015). However, the style of story telling was too slow-paced for me, but the mystery of Anna's true nature still managed to hold my attention up to when it was revealed. After that climactic moment though, the sequences that followed were developed unsatisfactorily. 4/10.
This movie has a very lightly veiled pedophile tone that worries me. I'm concerned this movie could be used as a tool to manipulate and normalize pedophilia. This movie really disgusted me.
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