Call Beasts of the Southern Wild Terrence Malick-light and you wouldn't be far off. Think Tree of Life as seen through the eyes of a child but marketed to a middle-class audience.

This could be a bad thing but it isn’t. Even when confronting the inevitable comparison to Malick and the film’s unapologetic whims to venture into a kind of fanciful realism that leaves some viewers feeling wildly manipulated, it’s hard to ignore the wonderful internal sense of life that Beasts pumps into nearly every scene.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is saddled with a poetically mystic title, alluding to a promise of a spiritual otherness – the kind that is obtainable only through the heightened reality of cinema.

The poster too – for indeed there can be no separation between the set-ups that lead you into the film and the film itself – shows a young girl, an urchin alit by fireworks in joyful harmony with whatever the title brings to mind: beasts, the south, the wild. It’s a name that further suggests that herein lies a poetic shift in how we see the world, no peyote or sweat lodge required. The imagery brings to mind a dance, and where poetry and dance meet, the mind is destined to expand.

But more often than not, such grandiose notions build to an occasionally compelling, frequently disappointing and always temporary experience. That Beasts of the Southern Wild, by first-time director Benh Zeitlin, transcends those notions is both commendable and worrisome.

It’s commendable in that Beasts tilts the axis of expectation towards something uncommon and deeply heartfelt. It’s worrisome in that by doing so it employs a kind of wayward mysticism that twists a devastating reality into something fantastical.

In Beasts, the fantastical is filtered through a six-year-old named Hushpuppy, a name so coyly consistent with her character it’s little wonder some feel a manipulating tug pulling at them throughout the story. Hushpuppy trails about barefoot in a make-shift swamp home like it was some crumbled dystrophic playground. She’s too young to recognize how devastating her poverty is, how sick her father is and how eternally lost her mother is and yet, she endures all of this with the unwavering confidence of an old soul.

Hushpuppy has the love of her community, most notably her father. That all of what is important to her can be washed away (and is) in a single night, is not just the writer/director ambushing middle-class sensibilities by exploiting the plight of a cute determined little girl, it is an entirely acceptable and rational way to make the leap from the specific to an overall bigger picture. In this sense, Beasts of the Southern Wild makes full use of its artistic oeuvres to transcend beyond an otherwise traditional movie-going experience.

Still, it’s fair to be cynical of any picture that serves a large dollop of fantastical homilies on a devastating reality and in that devastation is the New Orleans flooding. The film instills an ectopic magic in poverty that seriously deviates from reality and threatens to confuse hardship as soulful beauty and, at its worst, a deceitful custodian of a naive innocence. It’s pretty even when it’s mucking through Louisiana swampland and it’s magical even when the levee breaks and washes out entire communities. This, of course, isn’t true but then again, the absence of beauty is ugliness and not poverty, so why not deviate from reality with the allegorical?

That the film chooses to drape a poetic veil over the tragedy of childhood poverty and catastrophic environmental disaster is not necessarily negligent. There are long established precedents that use tragedy as the launching point for a fantastical journey. The Wizard of Oz immediately comes to mind and year’s later, Pan’s Labyrinth steps in with an even greater and unquestionably adult glimpse into a child’s life in upheaval, leaving Beasts of the Southern Wild falling somewhere in between.

Director:  Benh Zeitlin
Running Time:  91 mins
Rating: 4.5/5

Related interview: TORO Talks to Benh Zeitlin