Girl Asleep [Movie Review]

Girl Asleep is an Australian fantasy-horrorish coming-of-age story about a teenage girl named Greta. Living in the 1970s, she's near-friendless in school, and as well as that stress, her parents fight and her older sister incites tension. Ever the imaginative one, Greta once had vivid daydreams about what was in the woods, and this and the tension all come to a head during the fifteenth birthday party her mother throws for her. This culminates in a missing music box and Greta's journey.

What this film does exceptionally is recreate the bizarre realm of dreams and fairy tales. It's somewhat of a less grim Pan's Labyrinth where a young woman stumbles upon a fantasy world and embarks on a quest, and it's also in the same vein as Neil Gaiman, or Clive Barker's works that lean more heavily on the dark fantasy element than horror, though the horror is there. The film also does a subtle job of exploring the undercurrents of Greta's frightening, budding feelings toward the opposite sex. Admittedly, I related most of this entire narrative less to my adolescence and more to childhood daydreams, but then again, this film coalesces Greta's childhood imagination with her tenuous path through finding herself.

I was less of a fan of the more stereotypical teen drama elements, such as the shallow, popular alpha girl squad that exists to pressure and plague the heroine; this is because other elements are fresh and inventive, though, to be fair, the film does always lean toward conveying an absurd landscape. Still, given Bethany Whitmore's dynamic portrayal, the more "stock" aspects of the other characters fell flat.

Though I appreciate that Girl Asleep, clocking in under one hour and twenty minutes, does not overstay its welcome, the emotional stakes, such as the established parental tension, could've been further developed to create more nuances and parallels in the literary and figurative elements of Greta's journey, especially given the subject of the climactic scene, which was already a weaker point of the film.

At the same time, the concluding five minutes are solid, especially when it averts one particular trope in coming-of-age narratives: [spoiler] the whole guy gets the girl thing. [end spoiler] I look forward to more of Rosemary Myers' work.

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