SADIE – Review by MaryAnn Johanson

Writer-director Megan Griffiths knows how to do harrowing. Her 2013 film, Eden, is a brutal tale of a young woman kidnapped into sex slavery, and what she does to survive. Her latest, Sadie, has a disturbing power that sneaks up on you from an unexpected quarter: that of the moment of a teenaged girl’s crossing the boundary from childhood to too-early adulthood via a path that I cannot recall seeing onscreen before. This is a coming-of-age story that feels at once very universal, about impulses that are deeply rooted crossculturally in human experience and emotion, yet also one very much of its time and place: working-class America in the early 21st century. It’s also a story that, I suspect, would work equally well with a teenaged boy at its center without changing very much at all, but which gets extra unnerving power by casting it as a girl’s journey.

Sadie (Sophia Mitri Schloss) is 13 years old, and missing her father desperately: he is a distant figure on a faraway military deployment, one that he’s been voluntarily reupping for years — it seems as if he may be deliberately staying away. Certainly her mother, Rae (Melanie Lynskey), thinks so, and has long since given up on her marriage. And when Rae starts up a tentative romance with Cyrus (John Gallagher Jr.), a new neighbor in their Pacific Northwest trailer park, Sadie is incensed on her father’s behalf. Continue reading…