I'm going to preface this review by saying that of the films that I saw at the 2017 New Zealand International Film Festival, this was my least favorite. It frustrated me, made me angry, and yet, I couldn't stop thinking about how angry and frustrated it made me, so in retrospect this may be a selling point. Take that as you will.
So, an excruciatingly terrible title aside, the film is essentially Romeo and Juliet meets West Side Story with twelve-year olds - crossed with Stand By Me meets Beasts of the Southern Wild. Don't Swallow My Heart Alligator Girl suffers from a full blown identity crisis as far as what kind of film it wants to be - be it a coming of age tale, a magical- realism fantasy, a gang rivalry thriller, a family drama - before finally deciding "screw it" and trying to be all of them at once.
The end result? It's a complete mess. The film tries to do too many things all at once and never stays focused long enough for you to care. It blends relatively nuanced family/sibling drama with magical realism and tween romance and also gang warfare but also historical supernatural feuds - none of it gels. It's so set on bringing you all of these different ideas that it forgets to fully develop any of them. Cauã Reymond delivers the best performance in the film whereas the two young leads are precocious and completely insufferable - despite the fact that they are supposed to carry the bulk of the emotional backstory. I never cared about them, and at over two hours, the film is a complete slog from beginning to end.
The entire film is set in a dingy town with a very limited color palate, and unfortunately there is never a sense of place about the town either. At least when the two kids meet at night there is a variance in look somewhat - the sky is captured as a hazy dark blue with fireflies glowing all around. Overall, it looks fine - visually, but there's nothing particularly dynamic about it.
Don't Swallow My Heart Alligator Girl feels like bits and pieces from completely different movies cobbled together, with a flimsy framework of a plot to tie them together. The film shoots for the stars and deserves points for trying something different, but none of the film's disparate elements feel cohesive.
