Anne at 13,000 ft

Anne at 13,000 ft

Canadian drama “Anne at 13,000 ft” is a mumblecore movie that takes place during an incredibly tumultuous part of time for a young woman who’s emotionally vulnerable while she attempts to figure out how to handle different pressures. In terms of plots go, I know that’s not going to catch the eye of most people and I wouldn’t blame anyone for skipping it in favor of “Cinderella” or “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” but if the idea of watching a quiet portrait of someone going through a personal crisis without any cheap melodrama sounds interesting, then director Kazik Radwanski has done exactly that with undeniably captivating results.

Anne (Deragh Campbell) is an employee at a daycare center and when we first meet her, it’s impossible not to think she’s perfect for the job; she throws herself into it with all the reckless abandon and joy of her charges. The problem is that she gets too wrapped up in the playing part and forgets about her many real duties as an adult in the room, which causes frequent clashes with other teachers.

Outside the classroom, she comes across as shy and socially awkward person whose few personal relationships especially with her mother (Lawrene Denkers) and Matt (Matt Johnson), a guy she just started dating after drunkenly meeting him at a coworker’s wedding are all somehow off. The film never says so directly but Anne clearly suffers from some social anxiety disorder that can make even the simplest situation or conversation pivot towards meltdown territory on a dime.

At this point in Anne’s life (which makes up roughly two weeks or so of the film), Anne attends said wedding where one bachelorette party activity involves tandem skydiving. For most people who haven’t done such things before because they’re sane, jumping out of an airplane doesn’t sound like calming activity, but something beyond another leap awakens in her mind. Having largely been able to keep herself together until now, she can’t reconcile the freefall’s sense of freedom and abandon with the rest of what being an adult usually means and this increasingly leads to strange behavior on her part.

Since Anne works with kids, there’s a fear that the movie will exploit her issues for schlocky drama by engineering a scene in which one of her pupils is put in peril. Luckily, Radwanski has no interest in giving us an airheaded thriller that jettisons anything character-related to concentrate on plot mechanics.

There’s not much “plot” here as such Radwanski, whose previous films “Tower” (2012) and “How Heavy the Hammer” (2015) also featured protagonists with social interaction problems, is more concerned with offering up a character study of the kind of person we’ve probably all come across. He makes us see the world through their eyes in a way that privileges empathy over judgement; even when Anne crosses some serious behavioural lines.

Holding it all together is Campbell, who’s in every single scene and charged with locating both the appeal and the drawbacks of Anne’s mindset and bringing them out so as to represent her accurately to audiences without scaring them off. Her performance from start to finish is the sort of high-wire act that could trip anyone up because if she takes just one wrong step in how she plays Anne and her contradictions then it could all fall apart.

Here though she’s superb at balancing its vulnerable and sympathetic aspects those bits which first attract people towards her against tendencies to push things too far and then insist she was only joking. Some of these scenes are excruciating: perhaps most painfully, Anne brings Matt round to meet her family after dating him for a couple of weeks without telling any of them; she positively revels in the squirming this causes but they can’t take it quite like she can. Yet they still love her anyway.

“Anne at 13,000 ft” isn’t quite perfect though handled as deftly as possible, the skydiving conceit is maybe a touch too on the nose and leads to a closing shot that’s not quite as enigmatic as Radwanski presumably intended it to be. And even though it only runs for a relatively slim 75 minutes, the film is so punishing and bruising at points that some may find it too much even if they do ultimately appreciate it. But while this might not be an easy or relaxing watch, it is still a smart and potent exploration of contemporary mental health issues which deserves to be seen.

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