Sarah (Alison Brie) is a quirky, socially graceless woman with a penchant for braiding anklets, watching supernatural crime shows and adorning Willow, her beloved former horse, in handmade lanyards. She works in a craft store alongside her tenderhearted coworker Joan (Molly Shannon). After work, she attends Zumba classes to invigorate her health and self-confidence.
On her birthday, she receives a DNA toolkit foreshadowing her descent into an obsession with ancestry. Later, her extroverted roommate, Nikki (Debby Ryan), convinces Sarah to celebrate. Nikki’s boyfriend is forced to invite his sweet, ingenuous roommate Darren (John Reynolds) over, who likes Sarah in spite of her eccentricity. However, she stands precariously at the edge of a cliff overlooking an unfathomable pit, and all it takes is one little shove to send her spiraling into insanity.
“‘Horse Girl’ is ostensibly lackluster and profoundly unnerving”
The film takes a sharp turn from a mellow indie drama into a provocatively perturbing psychological thriller when scratches appear on the walls, precipitating a plethora of enigmatic events. Sarah begins having recurring dreams in which she lies in a white room between a man and a woman. Out of concern for her own mental health, she asks her stepfather about her mother, who committed suicide a year earlier. Later, she begins sleepwalking, experiencing inexplicable time loss and waking up to bruises on her ribs. As Sarah starts gazing a little too deeply into her grandmother’s photograph, she finds the resemblance between herself and the smiling, curly-haired woman uncannily striking. The longer she looks, the less sense she makes of the world and the more convinced she becomes that she is her grandmother’s clone. Her sanity quickly ebbs away to uncover the deep-rooted paranoia gnawing through her core.
Events climax as she finds herself naked in the craft store with no recollection of how she got there, suffering an ultimate breakdown that lands her in a psychiatric hospital. Viewers enter an otherworldly scene of arbitrary pastels and bizarre visions as they plunge into Sarah’s hallucinatory experience for an anticlimactic ending.
“Horse Girl” is ostensibly lackluster and profoundly unnerving. It is unpretentious and believable, yet arresting and outlandish. But perhaps what ultimately redeems this unembellished low-budget film is its delivery.
The hues and ambiance of the set itself are deliberately dull, austere and despondent, accentuating the role of Brie’s raw, heartfelt performance in making Sarah’s deepest fears as well as the actress’s own concerns about her family’s history of mental illness all the more real and tragic. She exudes authenticity in her drab, outmoded clothing, bare features, guileless portrayal and in the raw conviction she speaks with. Co-written by Brie herself and director Jeff Baena, the plot is thoroughly outlined while the dialogue is unscripted and improvised, allowing for natural, uncontrived conversation to carry audiences into the lulling ease and familiarity of mundane daily life.
“Perhaps beneath all the discordance of the movie’s conflicting screams is a clear cry for help”
This all changes into a cheapened, disenchanting spectacle as the movie attempts to enter the mind of a schizophrenic in a sci-fi-esque manner by incorporating erratic, clichéd visuals of white rooms, glowing white doors, scaly mummy-style clothes, dark halls and rays of white light carrying bodies into the sky, all redolent of hackneyed depictions of the mentally unstable falling victim to delusional alien abductions. Although the imagery may appear whimsical, it makes audiences question whether the film is intended to raise sympathy and awareness towards mental illness or is using schizophrenia as a pretext to lure viewers into watching a meretricious series of poorly woven sci-fi sequences.
The movie seeks to achieve profound ambiguity, but instead leaves viewers stripped of gratification or interest. This is because it fails to logically foreshadow enough about the conclusion throughout the film for compelling theories to be concocted by audiences, apart from suggestions that she is a psychotic schizophrenic succumbing to a tragically inexorable fate, or a woman who truly fell victim to an alien abduction after her fears were incredulously dismissed by others, diluting the film’s potential for depth.
Perhaps beneath all the discordance of the movie’s conflicting screams is a clear cry for help that is ineffectively responded to by all of Sarah’s surrounders, instigating a wake-up call for viewers to heighten their awareness of those around them in order to effectively prevent tragedies from occurring. This underscores a criticism towards the psychiatric hospital for releasing a mentally unstable individual into a dangerous world where they are vulnerable to peril and able to do as they please, from self-harming to committing suicide. Or perhaps it is used to illustrate the frightening reality that paranoia is untamable, like the wild, free spirit of a horse. In either case, “Horse Girl” does not fail to take viewers on a wild ride.
