Stephanie Review (Film, 2018) #31DaysofHorror

Stephanie is a horror film about isolation and fear from the perspective of a young child. Stephanie is living on her own. We see her try to do the best she can to survive. She cooks with the few ingredients left in her house—some frozen and canned fruits and vegetables—that aren’t rotting. Aside from isolation, there are signs that something is wrong. The occasional news report talks about containment procedures and an outbreak. The girl hears strange noises at all hours of the night. Objects move on their own, the doors and windows open even if they’re locked, and any light source is likely to go out with no explanation. Oh, and there’s the fact that her brother is dead in the bedroom next to her and she’s convinced he can move.

Stephanie and her best friend, a stuffed turtle, do their best to survive.

For the first act of the film, Stephanie is alone, and it’s glorious. It’s a post-apocalyptic horror film with fantasy elements from the perspective of an elementary school-aged child. Her scene partner is a stuffed turtle toy who may or may not also be able to move. Shree Crooks carries the weight of an entire film on her shoulders and does it with a wonderful screen presence.

Then Stephanie’s parents return at the end of the first act and the film turns into a family drama about grieving and trying to put the pieces back together after tragedy. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with this approach or turn in the story. It’s well executed and leads to some interesting moments. It’s just not as exciting as the opening act.

When the parents reenter, Stephanie transfers her survival tactics onto her family. Her father becomes her ally who can’t really provide answers. He is of as much value to her survival as the stuffed turtle she still carries with her. Her mother becomes the monster she’s afraid of upsetting. It begins to make you consider what was actually real or not in the opening sequence.

Well, it could have. It definitely would have been a strong choice. Director Akiva Goldsman and writers Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski do not trust the material or the audience enough to leave ambiguity. It’s a mere suggestion of a problem in the first act that spirals out of control once the parents reenter.

Stephanie and her father reconnect as Stephanie’s story is taken away from her scene by scene.

Stephanie is a tale about the perspective of an unreliable narrator. Stephanie is young. Not so young that she can’t manage to survive on her own, but young enough that she still believes her stuffed toys have personalities and can move on their own. Yet we never get an authentic experience of her perspective. Something is always there to pull us away and lead us to someone else’s view—sometimes the stuffed toy, most of the time the director’s eye—that prevents Stephanie’s story from being her own.

Take the opening sequence. Stephanie sets out to make herself a smoothie. She struggles to plug in the blender, fills the pitcher with almost an entire bottle of honey, and then breaks a giant jar of preserved lemons reaching for them on the top shelf. Stephanie, as a young child, is largely focused on her task, not her safety. She scoops up some lemons on a piece of broken glass and drops them in the blender. She then shoves her hand into the powered up blender to loosen up the contents so it will mix. This whole time, the camera keeps zooming in on Stephanie’s feet to show how perilously close she is to the glass. She’s not the one concerned about that, but the eye of the camera keeps focusing on it. It’s an overly controlled and forced voice on a story that could and should have been trusted enough to be told from the more interesting perspective of the lead character’s voice.

The narrative shift in the second act isn’t strong enough to justify the shift happening so early in the story. There was enough world, lore, and character to reveal through Stephanie’s solo survival that just gets thrown out there during the second act with nowhere near the creativity of the first. The turn leading to the third act feels particularly lazy after the first act and almost foreshadows a desire to force the audience away from our title character. It’s an odd shift in tone that just creates too much distance from an otherwise interesting lore and lead character.

Stephanie is currently streaming on Netflix.

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