“Werewolf film for queer Canadian teenage girls” may seem very specific as a subgenre, but 23 years after John Fawcett’s delicious cult article “Ginger Snaps”, comes “My animal” to ensure that he is no longer in a category of one. An elegant and sensual feature debut from an accomplished director of shorts and music videos Jacqueline CastelThis chilling tale of a suburban outcast whose crush on a handsome figure skater threatens to expose his secret shape-shifting skitters lightly between genres – touching on young adult romance, creature horror and dysfunctional family drama – while keeping its own identity as fluid and elusive as that of its wounded and haunted protagonist.

Played by remarkable non-binary performer Bobbi Salvör Menuez, protagonist Heather is among the most intriguing werewolves in horror history: a girl whose introverted demeanor and androgynous appearance once placed her on the fringes. of society in his sleepy, snowy town in northern Canada, and whose hereditary lycanthropy strikes him as both an added evil and a potential safety valve. But while his conflicted sense of self is thrown into overdrive by the advances of the beautiful and ultra-cool Jonny (a suitably magnetic person Amandla Stenberg), Jae Matthews’ storyline spins in circles, avoiding cathartic transformation or confrontation until the eleventh hour.

That ultimately makes this Sundance Midnight premiere a stylish tease – by no means scary enough for discerning horror-heads. Still, its dreamy blood and ice aesthetic and spiky Sapphic energy will appeal to connoisseurs of the LGBTQ+ genre, while Paramount has already secured worldwide distribution rights outside of Canada.

A bizarre prologue further proves the maxim horror films from “Poltergeist” to “Skinamarink” have taught us: when the camera lands on a blaring TV in an otherwise dark room in the middle of the night, nothing good cannot be on foot. As the stern-faced, pale redhead Heather watches a Z-class werewolf movie, the full moon outside triggers her furry transformation; before her parents Henry (an excellent Stephen McHattie) and Patti (Heidi von Palleske) can contain her, she runs away from home on an animal rampage. Henry has the affliction himself, which is seen in the family not as a curse but as a condition to be dealt with – much like the concrete presentation of cannibalism in Luca Guadagnino’s recent “Bones and All.” Heather has to be chained to her bed before her attacks, when her midnight curfew is a bit more urgent than most teenagers.

By day, however, she’s just an ordinary crackpot. A friendless tomboy who works at the local rink and aspires to play goalie for her all-male hockey team, she has no one to share her secrets with – not just her werewolf identity, which is less a blight on his unhappy family life. than her mother’s violent alcoholism, but her burgeoning lesbian sexuality. So when the impossibly glamorous Jonny doesn’t just give her the time of day, but seems genuinely interested in her, Heather’s world positively spins off its axis. She may not confess her supernatural burden to her new friend, but a different animal emerges as her pent-up sexual energy finally finds an outlet: although Jonny can’t quite let go of his sneering jock boyfriend Rick (Cory Lipman), she and Heather find in each other’s bodies the escape they mutually desire from the frozen reality.

Working mostly in a palette of snow, black ice and emergency red, Castel and DP Bryn McCashin use drunken camera movements, heavily saturated filters and the occasional strobe effect to sequester Heather and Jonny in their own world when they are together. A centerpiece scene of the two young women greedily kissing in a darkened bathroom, the camera snaking over and under and around them, creates a humidity that feels wildly foreign to this bitter place, otherwise framed in harsh compositions and serene. The glassy, ​​massive synths of Augustus Miller’s comeback score also swell with Heather’s physical excitement and restlessness; the filming of “My Animal” climaxes faster and more frequently than the tentative writing.

“My Animal” finally leaves a few too many tantalizing possibilities on the table, its use of animal transformation as a metaphor for a soaring libido only being superficially explored. Clues of genderqueer identification in our protagonist remain just that, while Jonny’s seemingly conflicted sexuality is seen only through Heather’s eyes. Yet even though their incompletely drawn characters remain largely in limbo, we feel for these two misfit lovers, thanks in large part to the easy and irritating on-screen rapport between Menuez and Stenberg. Menuez has something of Andrea Riseborough’s seamless, flexible intensity about them; their recessive, quirky physique is somehow both timeless and completely in tune with Stenberg’s scintillating movie star leg. Whether it’s a werewolf or a simple vixen, both don’t quite seem out of this world, let alone the snowy little world featured here.