Review: White Bird in a Blizzard

"I was 17 when my mother disappeared," says Kat Connors (Shailene Woodley) at the beginning of White Bird in a Blizzard. "Just as I was becoming nothing but my body - flesh and blood and raging hormones." Flesh and blood and raging hormones - all well within Gregg Araki's wheelhouse.

The film is set in the late Nineties, the decade in which Araki rose to prominence with The Living End and his Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy (Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation, Nowhere). Bearing a visual and aural beauty, his films were replete with alienation, frank eroticism and nihilism. (You can see touches of Araki's visual splatter in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and Darren Aronofsky's Requiem For a Dream.) White Bird in a Blizzard is Araki's most measured - some would argue convential - work to date but it is by no means a solid offering, so hampered is it by his own clunky and banal script. As Kat says of her father, "You scratch the surface and there's more surface."

Working in the key of Lynch, Araki imbues the mystery of Kat's mother's disappearance with a hallucinatory quality that more than nods to Twin Peaks. Things feel out of touch: the Connors' wood-panelled home gives off a Seventies vibe whilst her increasingly unhinged mother Eve (Eva Green) flounces around like a Fifties housewife. Kat's boyfriend's blind mother is just as eerie a figure as Kat's doormat dad (Christopher Meloni). Kat's dreams of finding her mother lying naked amidst a snowy landscape are nowhere near as unsettling as Eve coming into her bedroom in the middle of the night to interrogate her about her boyfriend Phil (Shiloh Fernandez) or, in another scene, staring at her daughter and saying, "You look like I looked when I was you."

Kat's burgeoning sexuality, her flickering into womanhood, jostles the jealousy of the desperately unhappy Eve, who used to criticise her formerly overweight daughter for being fat. Woodley, while not always providing emotional insight into a character who is more concerned with having sex than what happened to her mother, does convey Kat's transition with effective body language. Her seduction of Thomas Jane's macho detective is one for the highlight reel - he knows what she's there for and her testing of her sexual powers is one of the few times when Woodley takes charge of the film.

Otherwise it's Eva Green's show all the way and pity any actor that has to share a scene with her. Bewitching and wraithlike, her Eve is curdled with contempt and loathing; there's a danger in her eyes that's both wild and disembodied. You feel the descent. Those eyes are unforgettable in Green's last scene - mocking, defiant, triumphant - as the bird is strangled in the blizzard.

White Bird in a Blizzard

Directed by: Gregg Araki

Written by: Gregg Araki; adapted from Laura Kasischke's novel

Starring: Shailene Woodley, Eva Green, Christopher Meloni, Shiloh Fernandez, Thomas Jane, Gabourey Sidibe, Thomas Jane