The first film from Benh Zeitlin, it’s adapted from a stage play by Lucy Alibar called ‘Juicy and Delicious’. But this must be one of the least stagy adaptations ever made. Beasts of the Southern Wild is a soaring, poetic, magic realist film, a fairytale of a sort, set in ‘the bathtub’, a ravaged, swampy basin outside the flood barrier that was meant to protect New Orleans.
It’s not much but it’s home to six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis) and her ailing father, Wink (Dwight Henry), and a scattered group of hold-outs, too poor and proud to allow themselves to be relocated to what they call ‘the dry world’.