A bravura, multilayered lead performance by Annapurna Sriram anchors “Feral,” an intense drama about a young homeless woman’s struggles as a harsh winter begins to bear down on Brooklyn.
The opening scenes of the movie, showing Sriram’s character, sometimes called Yazmine — this woman struggles not just with homelessness but with mental illness, and she often denies that this is her name — are powerful, revelatory. Yazmine has an underground hiding space near some train tracks, and the way Sriram huddles among the detritus of her corner, much of it left by homeless people who had been there before her, comes close to making her condition palpable.
Yazmine’s hanging-by-a-thread state of being reflects in the prickly way she behaves, and this feels right. She dresses up and hits the street not quite knowing what she’s going to do there. Fragments of her past chisel their way into scenes, as do shots from an interview with Yazmine conducted at a site that we only see in the movie’s final third.
But as “Feral” — directed by Andrew Wonder from a script he wrote with Priscilla Kavanaugh and Jason Mendez — moves forward, it doesn’t always do a great job of splitting the difference between a raw depiction of harsh reality and ostentatious deck-stacking.
When a floppy-haired dude helps Yazmine cadge a smoke from some slumming mean girls and then “kindly” invites her to his place, he might as well be wearing a milquetoast predator sign around his neck. The depiction of a frayed social safety net feels both accurate and overdetermined. The movie can be frustrating viewing in ways its makers likely did not intend.
Feral
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes and other streaming platforms and pay-TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
