CAPSULE: The Fits (2016, Dir. Anna Rose Holmer)

A young girl who spends her afternoons hanging with her brother at boxing practice falls in with a dance crew in a neighbouring gym. There, as she starts to come out of her tomboyish shell, the girls around her succumb one by one to a unexplained seizures.

Anna Rose Holmer's debut feature, The Fits, is as enigmatic as it is kinetic. Predominantly wordless, Holmer leans heavily into the grunting, flailing physicality of her young lead, Royalty Hightower. As Toni, Hightower fills the screen with self-conscious energy, positioned somewhere between introversion and cock-suredness. In this she also straddles the two very gendered arenas in a way that celebrates the community they brings at the same time as deriding the inherent delineation.

More enigmatic is Holmer's treatment of the eponymous fits. The film toys heavily with the symbolism, even edging towards the sinister, but eventually settles with a kind of aloof affirmation of womanly rites of passage. If this isn't quite as satisfying as initially intimated, Hightower's climactic dance sequence, staged with an impressive sense of physical and emotional space, delivers on the film's well-tuned momentum.

Tight, resonant film making.

★★★★

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