Annie is a young girl with no parental supervision, no destined path in life, and is almost morally absent. Her days involve lumbering around her broken, decrepit town either shoplifting, eating, or just riding her bike in solitude. One day, she hears a voice call out helplessly from the bottom of a deep, dark well. It's sounds as if it belongs to an elderly woman who fell down the well and is hungry, desperate, and possibly injured. Annie is now at a quandary; this is likely the most responsibility in terms of choice and decision this girl has ever had and needs to take some position of action before it's too late.
David Zellner's Kid-Thing is an interesting film, solely for the purpose of its protagonist being so unpredictable, reckless, and, yet, so human that it's hard to turn your attention away from her. She is played by Sydney Aguirre, a young newcomer who handles the incredibly difficult role of playing a youth with crippled emotion stunningly. The camera is fixated on her for about seventy-five minutes out of the eighty-three minute affair, and she is never seen smiling or abandoning her default smug expression she has seemingly held forever. We can see quite clearly this is a fault of the broken environment she has inhabited for so long. It's a place - in the backwoods of Texas - that seems to have robbed little Annie of all emotional resonance and empathy.
Kid-Thing reminds me, most of all, of a film that popular trash director Harmony Korine or even transgressive auteur John Waters would make in their heydays. Korine, whose films Gummo and Julien-Donkey Boy are some of the best of the nineties, specializes in the commentary of broken, dismantled youths thanks to hopeless home-lives or community brokenness. His artistic vision would've greatly benefited an already gripping topic. Waters would've likely turned the subject into a short with more grittiness to the material, but no doubt both men would utilize shock-elements in their stories to amplify them to great effects.
Zellner uses the minimalist approach to tell this story, not looking to shock or appall, but to simply amuse, fascinate, and occasional mesmerize us with his talent for making the smaller moments beautiful and the entire picture elegant in its moral-emptiness. Making this material even remotely attractive, let alone watchable, is an achievement in its own right, and Zellner never seems to employ cheap glorification techniques on a story that is fragile and delicate. He, along with his brother, directed and starred in Goliath, another micro-budget independent film that generated much discussion.
Kid-Thing is a peaceful film dealing with subject matter, such as a broken adolescence, loss of innocence, and emotional vapidness, that is often loud and noticeable. This film takes time to build up scenes, many of them in particular, lack a payoff, which isn't always a bad thing. Pay close attention to the facial expressions of characters and the way they recite their lines; this is the first film ever where I don't believe I ever saw a character smile once.
Starring: Sydney Aguirre, Nathan Zellner, David Wingo, Zack Carlson, and Heather Kafka. Directed by: David Zellner.
