By Russ Fischer/Jan. 24, 2012 3:30 pm EST
The quote above comes from the Badass Digest review of the film. Beasts is by Benh Zeitlin, who made the 2006 short film Glory at Sea. This one stars newcomer Quvenzhané Wallis, one of many first-time actors in the film, as six year-old Hushpuppy, who lives in a somewhat alternate version of southern Louisiana.
While reporting on the Searchlight buy, THR summed up Beasts as follows:
THR also reviewed the film saying, calling it “one of the most striking films ever to debut at the Sundance Film Festival,” and says the film “unequivocally casts a spell, one that emanates from the strange world it inhabits and evokes, as well as from the extraordinarily sensitive and expressive way Zeitlin and his colleagues have rendered it.”
Beasts centers on Hushpuppy, a six-year-old girl who lives with her tough-love father at the edge of the water on the outside of protective levees in southernmost Louisiana. As he becomes sick and tries to prepare her for the end of the universe, mildly apocalyptic events cause the seas to rise, animals and trees to begin dying and giant, prehistoric creatures to thaw from the ice caps. As they struggle to survive with a handful of their neighbors who also refuse to leave their water-drenched home (called the Bathtub), Hushpuppy is forced to comprehend her place in the universe.
