Sweet of My Innocence: The Surreality of Horse Girl (2020)
Courtesy of Netflix
By Trevor Ruth
This review contains minor spoilers
Director Jeff Baena’s new film, Horse Girl (2020), almost feels like a Mulholland Dr (2001) for a new era. I say almost, because it doesn’t necessarily reach the foreboding sense of discomfort that has become the trademark of a David Lynch film, though not for lack of trying. Baena, known for his nominally eccentric work in The Little Hours (2017) and Joshy (2016) has turned his dark comedic eye to the cerebral, delivering a psychological oddball of a drama that may inspire more questions than answers, but is still wholly organic and inventive in its approach.
The film concerns Sarah (Alison Brie, who co-wrote the screenplay with Baena), an incredibly awkward but admirable young woman who works at an arts and crafts store, has trouble making friends other than her roommate, and is particularly overprotective of a horse named Willow who lives in a privately-owned equestrian stable. When she isn’t working, she’s spending her days alone in her apartment, watching her favorite television show, “Purgatory.” She also seems to suffer from sleepwalking, which doesn’t seem exceptionally problematic, until she starts waking up in weird situations. As the dreams continue, Sarah begins a frantic search for the possible meanings and causes of these dreams. Why is time displaced whenever she wakes up? What is the relevance of the people who appear in the white room with her? What is the explanation for the weird occurrences that happen as a result of her sleepwalking? Her speculation leads her down avenues of madness, born from what one might assume to be grief and paranoia—a response to the sudden death of her mother—but is possibly something more complicated.
Courtesy of Netflix
Sarah’s psychological perspective is imperative to consider because it immerses the viewer in the character’s potential psychosis and what defines her reality. As Sarah’s life spirals into discord, so too does our understanding of that reality, of how it functions and what gives it meaning. For all of Ryan Brown’s meticulous editing that recalls an experimental art house drama, the cinematography is actually deceptively simple. There’s nothing incredible about the way shots are set up. On a serious, technical level, there is nothing that instills discomfort in the viewer in terms of visuals, as opposed to a commercial psych-drama where imagery alone is a huge component in building a surreal, nightmarish landscape. Then again, we are looking at a film that doesn’t exactly want to approach its theme of mental health to the extent of Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018); rather, Horse Girl wants to exist as its own entity.
Horse Girl’s interests lie within a more personal approach, a more character-driven narrative. The simplicity of the cinematography and saturated lighting offer an impressionism akin to an independent feature and indeed, very little is given in the way of spectacle, though there are some moderately interesting effects used every so often. This is a film where the visuals are exemplary in their minimalism, but quiet in their metaphor; it begins with a slow, ‘80s style opening credit crawl where the camera slowly zooms in between the branches of trees towards a bright, blue sky before it suddenly becomes a portion of fabric that is cut in twain by Sarah and her work friend, Joan. Fabric acts as a motif: the image of blue cloth being cut in half is repeated in the opening scenes while scene transitions later in the film are identified via cross-dissolves with pink portions of fabric that resemble curtains. Also, in the supposed climax, Sarah creates a bodysuit out of pink fabric that one might consider to be embryonic in nature. I assume that the suit exists as a version of the tin-foil hat, given that a lot of Sarah’s paranoia comes from the belief that she is the product of an alien cloning project and that she, herself, is a clone of her late grandmother.
So much of the film depends upon audience attentiveness: there are plenty of underlying themes and clues to what exactly is happening in Horse Girl that, sometimes, it’s difficult to see the forest for the trees; the recurring phone calls at the arts and crafts store with no one on the other end, the fact that her favorite television show is called “Purgatory,” the random nosebleeds, the dream sequences of a light beam on water, the homeless man yelling at strangers about government conspiracies outside of her workplace. All of these details disrupt the audience’s full attention to the matter at hand, which is Sarah and her connection to the real world. When the world actually becomes tactile, the narrative becomes more definite: Sarah is an awkward girl, completely lacking in social skills, and Alison Brie plays this character to a tee, with mannerisms and facial expressions that are superficially kind but expose a psychological distance. Sarah’s idea of making connections with the real world include obsessively telling people she meets that they have the same name as characters in “Purgatory,” of acting on her perfectionism at work and criticizing the young girl who rides Willow despite the horse owners’ obvious—though brilliantly subtle—disdain for Sarah’s presence at the stable.
Sarah longs for normalcy, though still tends to fail as her dreams force her miles from her home with her clothes on backwards. To be fair to her, everyone is awkward in this movie, dropping lines like, “I love water,” and arguing over what a baker’s dozen really is, but perhaps these small variations in what one might perceive as normal is a product of Sarah’s reality becoming unraveled, or—rather—cut in two. The severity of Sarah’s psychosis is only heightened by the spooky retro score by Josiah Steinbeck, Jeremy Zuckerman and Tolga Kahraman, which ranges from experimental synth drones to erratic sections of jazz-inspired improv.
Courtesy of Netflix
On its surface, Horse Girl is a very dry film. One could watch this and assume that Sarah is suffering some kind of schizophrenic episode and that this might be the reason for the bizarre nature of the plot. But what Baena has truly given us is a look at grief through loneliness. Sarah really has no family. She had a mother, but her mother died (according to Sarah, it was by suicide). She had a grandmother, but everybody thought she was crazy due to a psychosis of her own (inspired by Brie’s own family history of mental illness). She has a stepfather who does his best to be supportive, giving her a birthday card filled with what looks like thousands of dollars, but she doesn’t exactly have a close relationship with him. We can discern from this that perhaps Sarah doesn’t have much of a family to fall back on outside of Willow, a horse who used to be hers and whom she shared a deep connection with. When Willow no longer belongs to her, she loses the one kindred spirit whom she considered a part of her family. The owners of the stable still allow Sarah to visit Willow, but judging by their interactions and facial expressions, it’s clearly out of pity for Sarah. To this end, Sarah has no one to fall back on, to support her. It’s possible that Darren—the new boyfriend who comes into her life before her psychosis takes hold—could have offered familial comfort, but for all of his own awkward character traits he too cannot seem to accept Sarah for all of her loneliness, for all of her brokenness. Despite all of these challenges in her dwindling social circle, Sarah never gives up on keeping Willow a part of her life. In this way, she is able to make some sense of her misfortune.
Perhaps the “Purgatory” reference has a place in this narrative, after all. Not in a literal sense, but rather in an emotional one. Sarah’s life is a mundane series of unfortunate circumstances, brought upon by her reality being cut in two. Cut, not torn: her reality is still functional, only rendered more finely. Her connection to Willow keeps her grounded to reality and this is what drives her to be so protective. Her criticisms of the young girl riding Willow are akin to a mother looking after her child. She is aware of the importance Willow plays in her life and she continues to maintain the integrity of that relationship. In the end, Sarah takes initiative in maintaining that connection to reality and, in doing so, reaches a transcendence; one that—like the rest of the film—is weird and confusing, but also rather beautiful, all things considered.
Trevor Ruth is a writer from Livermore, California, whose work has previously appeared in Occam’s Razor, The Southampton Review, and other literary journals. He writes fiction and poetry that utilizes slipstream to subvert genre ideals, as well as critical essays on film and art. Find more of his work on Instagram @crimsoncomet3.