That is a weird film.
Funnily, it looks like a rough sketch of something bigger to come, but that would never exist - a bigger feature film, or a series, something that would offer the space needed to develop the ideas the creative crew (all members of the same family it seems) only touch on during the brief moment of the movie.
The framework is very simple: it's the story of two outcasts lost in a space and a time they don't fit in. Graphically, the film is a joyride, really: many are the good, inventive ideas of cinema, great are often the way the camera moves, the pace, the editing, the settings.
Yet, Hellbender's plot is then full of holes.
The center of the film, the relationship between mother and daughter, is interesting, thanks also to the two actresses whose simple, almost blank acting contributes a lot to the alchemical mystery. However, it's also very fustrating to be given so little clues. The screenplay invite us viewers to share for a brief moment their geographical as well as cultural isolation, but without telling us too much. So ethereal and vaguely suggested are the whys and wherefores that in the end these two figures escape us completely - which might also be a good thing as it deepens even more their out-of-place, otherworldly idiosyncrasies. Fustration can be intellectually and emotionally fruitful, it's always a matter of balance between what is showed, what is hidden, what is intelligible, what stays puzzling.
And puzzling Hellbender is. The film could be compared to a tapestry, but the spotlight would only be focused on a couple of pieces of fabric; of the rest you'll know nothing; it lies in the shade only to materialise briefly in some occasional suggestive scenes one can take a glimpse of in the course of the story; these snipets of an aborted, more ambitious work are quite thrilling, really, but in the context of this very film as an object, that's only what they are: flourishes to drool over, never completely daring enter the heart the tale to make its pulse more vivid.
This reluctance to reveal the whole of the tapestry is really too bad. I don't disaprove ellipsis: it's fuel for the imagination, but Hellbender uses them in excess. I hope one day I'll eventually see these vain teasers give birth to that greater, more complete narrative thread they're calling for.
