Do you recommend Electrick Children?
I do! I found it on Netflix during my trying-to-catch-up-on-indie-movies-of-the-past-five-years kick and I really truly loved it. It’s from a lady director/screenwriter (Rebecca Thomas) which is always a bonus for me, but that aside, the filmmaking is just lovely.
Electrick Children is about a young Mormon girl who discovers she’s pregnant and believes it’s an immaculate conception caused by listening to a blue audio tape cover of Blondie’s “Hanging on the Telephone”. She then steals the family’s truck and drives to Vegas to find the voice on the tape. It’s intimate and sweet and way less judgmental than one might expect going into that premise. I think the screenwriter came from a Mormon background herself, which may be why the characters feel so dimensional and wonderfully familiar. It’s visually poetic and bordering on magical realism at points according to some critics, and the ending is a bit more on the open ended side but I didn’t mind it – it made me rewatch some parts of the film with a more critical eye. It felt a little like prose turned into film.
The cinematography and color grade is what I’m most drawn to in terms of the technical elements – there’s been a trend in indie films of the past few years to go shaky handheld with low-contrast muted color grades, whereas Electrick Children has a floaty but steady look and a color grade somewhere between the cheap indie low-contrast and the orange-blue saturation of Hollywood studio films. It just really really appeals to me on an aesthetic level and I screencapped it like mad for reference.
That said, it’s a bummer that pretty much everyone with a speaking role is white, but you can’t have everything all the time and I’m excited enough to have found another lady director whose work I loved.
If you wind up watching it, would love to hear your thoughts!
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