Celia (1989)

directed by Ann Turner

Australia

97 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

Note: I am still extremely busy and haven't had the time to write anything new, so this is an old review that I've dug up from my archives and reworked for quality. My apologies - by hook or by crook I will be back to writing new reviews next week.

Celia is a horror movie (if it can be called a horror movie at all) where the horror is experienced through a child's perspective, it's also a movie that presents that horror as part of the experience of being a child. The horror here is inextricable from personal experience instead of existing as an external force that can be corroborated by an outside observer. What this movie is really about is how the worlds of children and the worlds of adults are often totally incompatible and incomprehensible to each other. The title character is a nine-year-old girl who has a relatively normal childhood (insofar as any childhood can be called "normal"), with all of life's mysteries still yet to be revealed, and to her - and, arguably, objectively - all of the adults in her life act against what she believes to be morally correct. 

A really good example of this last point is the way the film deals with politics. A running theme is the ruling by the then-PM of Australia that all rabbits, including those belonging to children as pets, are to be rounded up and killed, as they are considered vermin. Celia has to cope with this despite not having the capacity to understand it the way adults do. At one point she draws devil features on a picture of the PM in class and is told off for it by the teacher. While the adults view this as extremely disrespectful, they don't see that Celia is interpreting the PM's actions according to the rules of engagement that govern her and her peers: it does not follow that this man should be above recourse, he's a stranger who is telling Celia that her beloved pet is to be surrendered and killed, what is she supposed to do? Not fight back? Celia has no internalized concept of politics or the idea of respecting someone solely based on their office: she treats the PM the same way she would treat her own contemporaries.

Another running theme is the adults around Celia attempting to force her into cutting off relationships based on their own fears of communism. Celia also deals with this the same way she'd deal with a contemporary: you tell me they're communists, and that they're bad people, but they've never hurt me or my friends, and they're always kind to me, so how can they be bad people just because you say they are? The logic the adults follow is the strange stuff here, not what Celia does - the fallacy of shunning some people because of their beliefs and blindly following the rule of others - of strangers - simply because they hold the highest office in the land is presented as a more childish belief than the rituals and games Celia involves herself with.

The way Celia's most heinous act (not spoiling it) is dealt with is also interesting because I think a lot of other movies would make that the thing that ends the film. Other movies wouldn't show, afterwards, her doing something else that could have ended in a similarly disastrous fashion, but didn't. They would make it a black-and-white issue: as soon as Celia did it, she would have been established as being in the wrong. But the mock hanging of her friend afterwards shows that the balance between life and death, justice and injustice, and the definition of what is and isn't a violent act does not hold constant between the worldviews of children and those of adults. It doesn't cast judgement on Celia for what she did or place blame on the people in her life for not teaching her right; it presents her as someone with agency who made a logical choice according to the way she understood justice and reciprocity.

I very much enjoyed this movie and despite it not turning out to be what I'd call "horror" without reservations, I thought it was one of the better films to explore the unique anxiety of being a child. I intended to watch it as a Christmas movie but that didn't really work out.