There’s a lot of different ways movies end up on my watchlist. One of the rules I follow is that if a movie is loved by critics, but hated by the audience, I will do my best to watch it, because there must be something interesting about it. The rule worked again. 93% critics score versus 4.9 on IMDb is like catnip to me. (I don’t even really know what that means, but it is an idiom, so I’ll use it.)

There’s other reasons to put it on my watchlist as well: female director, queer story, pretty obscure, small budget, and so forth. Yes, I’m woke. Actually, having seen somewhere around 5000 movies, I just often gravitate towards movies made with different points of view. Somehow I managed to convince myself that this was a debut movie, which I also often see as a positive when thinking about what movies to find, but it turns out that despite the director’s age (21 at the time), this was her sixth feature. That’s different enough to be interesting as well.

Now, the movie explicitly says that it’s a trans story. This may be the cis-me, but it didn’t feel like it was. Sure, the protagonist is a trans woman, but this was not a story about her struggling with her identity or anything like that. Quite the opposite, she seems to be quite comfortable with herself. There is one moment where she is about to have sex with a man and wants to disclose being trans first, but the man really doesn’t seem to care, so that doesn’t come up again. So, to me this isn’t a trans story, its a story that just happens to have a trans character. But again, this might just be my cis-ass not being able to read subtext on this topic.

So, Anna decides to leave home after hearing her mother and stepfather argue about her “laziness”. She moves in with her sister and finds work in a small record store, after which she meets a woman, Gen, with whom she starts a relationship. However, there’s also an incident at the store, where someone tries to rob it, but Anna uses magic she didn’t know she possessed to resolve the situation. After this, she explores her newly found abilities with Gen. However, Gen also has abilities, and she unleashes a demon through a tattoo, which the two of them now need to find.

The movie is very cheaply made, but they make it a statement. It feels like stylistic choice. A lot of hazy neon colors and so forth.

Part of the magic is just that boring “she just knows magic” you so often see in movies, but some of it is cool. I really like the idea of tattoo magic and they use it in a very interesting way here.

I also like the ending of the movie. This isn’t a thriller or an explosive action movie, so they just let things happen in a more natural way. The movie is quite short, but doesn’t feel rushed. I guess this is because the story isn’t very complex.

The movie is also quite horny and Anna doesn’t get punished for it. Others kind of do, but not for long. It doesn’t feel like people are punished for wanting to have sex, although the movie is kind of walking the line on this.

So, overall, most people won’t like this, but I did. It might require some amount of indoctrination. Not into the queer world (from which I’m a complete outsider), but into microbudgeted movies 8not that I know what the budget was here, but I assume). It doesn’t fit neatly into any genre. There’s romance elements, fantasy elements, horror elements and so forth, but it doesn’t feel like a horror movie (which often overwhelms other genres its combined with). What makes these movies shine is that the people behind are passionate, and in this case this appears to be the case.