Ideally, this unique movie should be seen without knowing anything at all about it in advance; sorry about that. But it’s worth writing a little about it anyway, because it seems to be so misrepresented elsewhere. If you’re looking for a folk horror movie, or indeed any kind of horror movie you might be tempted to give Celia a look, because ludicrously, it’s also known as Celia: Child of Terror. That title does the film the double disservice of both setting the potential viewer up for disappointment and giving away too much. Similarly, those lured in by the two lines of synopsis offered up by IMDb will quickly discover that that synopsis is based on the first, not especially representative five minutes of the film. The other description, a “coming of age drama” – is so vague as to be pointless and anyway doesn’t seem quite right for a movie about a girl of 10 or 11 years of age – but I guess they had to try to market it somehow, and it’s hard to know which approach to take.
The story, such as it is, can be summed up in a few lines which give little idea of what the movie is actually like. In rural 1950s Australia, against the backdrop of the cold war and plague of rabbits that are damaging the country’s agriculture, a young girl with a vivid imagination grieves for her grandmother and makes friends with the new kids next door. That, without spoilers, is it. Every part of that synopsis can be fleshed out considerably and it still doesn’t begin to describe the strangeness of the movie – and yet it’s not a “difficult” film at all. As the film begins, young Celia Carmichael (Rebecca Smart) discovers the body of her grandmother and, unable to cope with the blunt reality of the situation, the discovery blends in her mind with her favorite macabre fairy tale The Hobyahs, and she imagines the goblin-like creatures coming for her after taking her grandmother. That’s what most of the film’s publicity material seems to have focused on and although the scene is crucial, from that point on, the fantasy element that it introduces really only lurks in the background, aside from in a few key scenes.
The school holidays begin and we are introduced to the small cast of characters; there are Celia’s emotionally distant parents, Pat (Mary-Anne Fahey) and Ray (Nicholas Eadie), the new kids next door who Celia becomes friendly with, and their parents, especially their mother Alice (Victoria Longley). Alice is a far warmer person than Celia’s own parents and Celia – and her father – quickly becomes close to her. We then discover that, like Celia’s grandmother, the new neighbors are communists – a significant detail, since Australia was having a McCarthy-ite “Reds under the bed” scare at the time. We also meet the local policeman, who is Celia’s uncle and his daughter Stephanie (Amelia Frid), with whom Celia has a complicated and difficult love/hate relationship.
The pace of the movie is deliberate, though not actually slow, the running time is only an hour and 45 minutes and yet there’s far too much plot to easily summarize. In some ways, it’s obviously a film about loneliness and isolation; after Celia’s grandmother has gone, Celia only really wants two things in life. One is her dead grandmother’s kabuki mask, which gains a strange, totem-like significance within Celia and her group of friends, who have an ongoing feud with another group of neighborhood children, including Stephanie. The other is a pet rabbit, which she eventually gets and gloriously, names Murgatroyd. Murgatroyd becomes Celia’s constant companion and only real confidant when her friends – with whom she makes blood oaths countless times throughout the film – and her family let her down in various ways. It turns surprisingly dark and what seems like a lot of disparate strands somehow all come together when the government introduces myxomatosis into the wild rabbit population to tackle the problem of crop destruction and then bans the keeping of pet rabbits. The fantasy element, kept skilfully in mind throughout the film, comes to the fore again in an extremely bleak and unpleasant climax, but the lasting feeling that Celia leaves behind it is more one of melancholy than horror.
Celia looks and feels like it was shot on a modest budget, but the writing and direction are so assured that that is never a handicap. The evocation of what is – outside of Australia at least – an unfamiliar time and place feels vivid and realistic, as do the characters – especially the casually cruel but essentially innocent children. It’s a strangely deadpan movie, but as with Celia herself, it feels as though there are deep emotions lurking beneath its calm and deliberate surface. The only film that comes to mind as a comparison – for a variety of reasons – is Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures – still arguably his best film – but although Celia isn’t quite in that league, it’s a modest masterpiece in its own right, and all the more enigmatic because it bears no relation to whatsoever to anything else in writer/director Ann Turner’s diminutive filmography.
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