Horse Girl (2020)

Jeff Baena and Alison Brie’s off-kilter film Horse Girl lures audiences through its wilderness with its use of misleading setups and fluid visual style. Its momentous open ending, however, seems to have left a lot of critics confused and disgruntled on a variety of choices made by the director and screenwriters. The genre, message, and enjoyability of the film have all been called into question. While mixed reviews are not unique to Horse Girl, very few other pieces of cinema offer the opportunity to re-evaluate the way we read film. I believe the distaste and disorientation apparent in a lot of its reviews stem from an inability to refocus the lens through which we capture storytelling.

The film follows a young woman by the name of Sarah (Brie), whose journey down the sinister rabbit hole of losing touch with reality leaves spectators wondering where her visions stop and a tangible plot begins. The most prominent question I’ve come across in my reading is, “Is this a mental health picture or a sci-fi?”

While many critics make the case for both, a firm answer is always just out of reach. The plot contains simultaneously too much and too little of each element to be wholly one label or the other. What is interesting about the structure of this particular piece may be the same reason that making a case for its genre is futile. Sarah’s journey puts less emphasis on the beats, (the plot points of the story), and more emphasis on the sensations created through experiencing her reality.