Hellbender

 Teenager Izzy (Zelda Adams) lives in the middle of nowhere with her mother (Toby Poser). They forage, do home-schooling, and like to glam up for band night, where they play doomy, riff-heavy rock songs they compose themselves.

 The girl is completely isolated; any neighbours live "the next mountain over", and whenever her mom goes to town she leaves her behind under the pretext that she has a rare immunological disease. They're happy together; It seems like a good life. When alone, Izzy takes long walks through the woods, swims, and draws whatever bit of gorgeous Catskills scenery catches her fancy. As for mom, she sometimes performs messy, blood-heavy rituals when her daughter's not around, receives ominous visions from an ominous-looking book, or makes the random hitchhiker (John Adams) explode in a shower of ash with a single gesture.

 But if teenagers are good at anything, it's at screwing things up for the adults. Damn teens. On one of her walks Izzy randomly meets another teen (Lulu Adams) lounging by a pool in the house the next mountain over, and they strike a tentative friendship. This leads her to discover that when she strays from her strict vegan diet, she gets strange powers. For she is a Hellbender (not to be confused with the Augustine order of hellbound saints), a witch-like, not-quite human being, and she gains power from whatever she eats. And that knowledge sets her on a collision course with her mother.

 Hellbender is an engagingly weird coming-of-age story / family drama / horror hybrid shot during the height of the COVID lockdown by the Adams family (Toby Poser and John Adams are married, Lulu and Zelda are their children; They take turns directing, shooting, and scoring the film, which they wrote together as well. The whole credits sequence is basically their names, listed over and over again -even the house in the movie is their family home. A truly home-grown film.

 It's surprising just how polished it all is. The music is great, with some really good original songs; The acting's excellent, the story well written, fun and unique... and it looks beautiful, too, with the crisp digital cinematography and handsome compositions.
 The effects, unfortunately, bring it down a few notches, but I'm not about going to dock the movie points for being ambitious; Sure, some of the sequences are a little funnier than they should be, but broadly speaking they work, and they successfully deliver their payload of cool ideas. Some of the visual language is also slightly clumsy, with lots of reaction shots, but that's only really an issue in a couple of scenes.

 Those niggles aside, this is a pretty great film from a very talented film-making collective.