Beasts of the Southern Wild

This is the end, Hush Puppie’s only ‘sort of’ friend, the end. The end for the place that raised her, the thing that made her and the universe as she knows it; an intimate apocalypse, a wasteland in miniature. Beasts of then Southern Wild tells a tale of many ends; one of destruction, of degradation, one of the dirty, of the daily rotting corpse that once was a civilization and it tells it with the unfettered joy of the ultimate child. Hush Puppy is a happy, primitive child ( not a racist remark. I mean, really now) unlike all of those that you would see on the streets were you not inside reading this: she is at one with the soil on which she stands, she plays with, pets, kills and digests animals on an whim and lives in a world of her own imagination. A world that is coming to an end.

The film itself apes both her cleverness and curiosity through Benh Zeitlin’s behind the camera style; it’s essentially a series of short, playful scenes that are filled to the brim with terrific textures, bright lights and rousing, rumbling sounds. It’s sensual and so much designed for the instinctual reaction it will get, regardless of whether or not it could or would really happen. Though despite all of the dazzlingly dramatic imagination presented by the picture it is in fact not a fantasy, but an all too true tale of a real city that to this day lies in ruins. Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts is a deeply buried biopic of New Orleans, a closeted call to arms asking us to either fix what is busted or be ready to bear the brunt of its demise when that day comes, and like the Aurochs it is indeed coming.