Getting past my click-baity title, yes, Alison Brie goes full frontal naked in Jeff Baena‘s weirdly hypnotic Horse Girl. Yup. Totally nude. But before I get into why that matters, if you haven’t seen or are still on the fence about this Netflix title, allow me to give you a bit of a non-spoiler-ish rundown. You might want to be sitting.
We meet the mousey Sarah (Brie), a young woman working at a craft store with her boss Joan (Molly Shannon). Sarah is nebishily adorable but there’s a kind of “hmmm?” lingering about her that keeps her slightly out of focus. You wonder about her but you can’t put your finger on it. She’s cute an’ all, but she’s got this look in her eye like … Danger Will Robinson.
Anyway, she lives with a roommate, the outgoing and responsible Nikki (Debby Ryan), who we assume must be a longtime friend giving her a place to stay. Why else would she allow this? Nikki seems to be putting up with some peculiarities about the often housebound Sarah that raise some questions, let alone the hairs on the back of your neck. Why is she standing there in the dark in the middle of the night? Stop that! Either way, Nikki wants her to get out more and meet people. She sets her up with her boyfriend’s pal Darren (John Reynolds), an equally kind of quirky guy who finds a connection but soon has no idea what he’s in for when he admits some ideas he has about Bigfoot, Loch Ness, and aliens in passing. Them are gates you don’t want open when you’re having a car ride with Sarah. You end up in a graveyard in the middle of the night dodging a pair of scissors.
See, it turns out that Sarah is having some decidedly strange experiences in which she seems to be losing time … and worse, might be getting abducted repeatedly by space creatures? What’s more, she becomes convinced she is a clone from a long line of clones where nothing about her is real. Is she her own grandmother? It begins to have some serious repercussions in her life. I mean, why wouldn’t it? This kid is cuckoo. Or is she? Ahhhwwwk. What is going on?
Co-written by Brie with Baena (and produced by the always eccentric Duplass Brothers), Horse Girl is a tough cookie to crack. It starts somewhat perfunctory, as if it’s going to play directly into the hand it seems to have dealt us, but then slips into some ambiguity that forces some interpretation, ending on a final visual that is practically soaked in “you figure it out.” If you’ve read anything by me at all before though, you know I love stuff like this. Horse Girl is effing nuts.
So, yeah, this is a divisive film, as it intends to be, but no matter how you feel after it’s over, you do feel something, and that is surely enough to at least give this some credit. And I’m not here to offer absolute explanations about anything, for that would take half the fun of watching out of your hands, so if you’re looking for answers, there are plenty of other sources delivering their opinions I’m sure.
What I do want to talk about it Brie herself. She’s come along way from her Community days of course and is beginning to solidify her position as an actor looking to take chances. I really liked what she did in 2015’s Sleeping With Other People and if you haven’t at least seen Season One of GLOW, you are missing out of what is arguably the best work she has ever done. This woman is fearless in pushing herself to ‘become’ who she is on screen.
Now, in the story – I’m gonna jump around I guess – we can understand why Sarah works at a craft store, the symbolism of cutting fabric in relation to the fabric of her mind well woven into the story, a later sequence where she is wrapped in such that resembles the color and texture of a brain not so subtle even as it sort of still is. You want to laugh at the onsies pajama-eque look of it all but then again no, no you don’t. Not at all. I mentioned this is a weird movie, right?
But whatever the visuals and metaphors and ultimately what you take away from it, it remains Brie’s traumatic performance that carries this through to its fantastically murky end. She creates Sarah as a woman unbelieving of the things that are happening but unable to resist how real they are. What do you do if there is no logical explanation for the why’s in your life than the most absurd? This is presented with extreme care by Brie, who clearly connects with this character, leveling a thunderpunch of agony on the confusion and need for someone, anyone to believe.
That is the “fun” of the first two acts of Horse Girl, which slowly ties its fate to an incident in Sarah’s childhood with a younger sister and horse. That might seems contextually enough to understand fully what is wrong with Sarah, but the film isn’t about to make it that easy. Sarah is stunted, absolutely, but to what extent and how much so we must discover. As does she.
And this leads us to Sarah in the buff. This moment comes well into the film and after a vision when clarity is uncertain. Sarah has lapses in her memory that also seem to be losses in time, “waking up” in places she has no memory of getting to. So she emerges from the stock room of her job utterly absent of any clothes, terrified, shaken, and frantic. To her, she was taking a shower, which itself was less than cleansing. Now she is here.
Nudity is often symbolic for vulnerability in movies, and that is what we get here, with Sarah stripped of everything and forced to contend with a reality that is anything but. And it’s no surprise that when she realizes where she is and how she looks, she curls herself into swaths of pink fabric. We see Sarah at the tipping point, shed of everything but the delicate miable folds of her mind. It’s a powerful image.
And so it is, the film makes its choice and takes us on a path of uncertainties, building up confidences in its audience and then knocking them down. An extended sequence in the last act as she visibly leaves herself in one place while heading off to a freedom she wants desperately to have might seem obvious in offering a solution but we must ask, which is the real Sarah?
Horse Girl is a challenge, and most may find it too inaccessible for a film they know stars the wonderfully perky Brie. I’ll admit, I was riding shotgun in that thought as well, loving her in GLOW and looking for more of that warmth here. It is decidedly not, but that is not any reason to dismiss this. It pushes for conversation and debate, which is fun in itself, but more importantly, it exposes Brie as a monumental talent, an actor trusting herself to find the darkness and strong enough to carry us through it. It’s a mesmerizing performance.