Thelma
**BASICALLY ALL SPOILERS**
From reading about Thelma, I thought I would really like it. It started promisingly; it certainly looks good and sets up some interesting mysteries and character conflicts, a possible romance. It was well acted and I sympathised with Thelma a lot. I was enjoying watching it and I think it was well made.
Unfortunately, it starts to lose the plot towards the end.
Towards the end the movie flips our expectations and sympathies, so the parents are no longer controlling nuts she needs to break away from, they are actually trying to keep the rest of the world safe from her dangerous powers. Which is actually kind of interesting. Then she breaks free, kills her dad and continues to coerce the girl she likes into a relationship. So evil, horror ending. Or is it? It seems to be presented as some kind of triumphant her taking control of her powers, and she does heal her mum.
And it seems some viewers think this is some kind of great movie about “being your authentic self” as I’ve seen people describe it on letterboxd. Yeah, if “being your authentic self” means murdering half your family. Priorities, millennials.
It sort of makes sense allegorically, in a "let the past die kill it if you have to" (thanks Star Wars) sort of way, but not narratively. Taken literally, how can we root for her given what she did to the baby and her father? She shows no remorse but just rails at the unfairness of its impact on
her.
I found it was too creepy and unpleasant for me to really be immersed in from the point of the first flashback with the baby, it was too horrible.
The plot actually reminded me a bit of Frozen… girl with powers accidentally harms her younger sibling and her parents tell her to ‘conceal don’t feel’. If, instead of horrifically killing her father she’d just magicked up a sparkly dress and sung a song about letting it go, I might have liked it better. Also, there could have been trolls.
So all in all I have mixed feelings about it.