2021, directed by the Adams family
A fun thing about Hellbender is that it was created by a married couple, John Adams and Toby Posey (to clarify, Toby is a woman) and their two daughters Zelda and Lulu. Zelda and Toby play the two main characters and Lulu the main supporting character, while John and a bunch of other people they presumably hired the normal way fill out the rest of the cast. That’s kind of awesome.
Hellbender is a story about mothers and daughters and all the complicated things that go on between them. Its depiction of magic is an interesting one – magic comes from fear of death, something possessed by every living thing, even a worm, and it fills their blood. If you consume the blood, you consume the power. The proxy-ness of it reminds me a little bit of Daughter of Smoke and Bone in which magic comes from pain, and generally speaking the pain is represented by teeth. Baby teeth, in that canon, give only tiny amounts of power because they don’t hurt much to come out, they’re designed to. Adult teeth give more. And for real power you skip past teeth entirely and create pain another way. Unlike Daughter of Smoke and Bone though, Hellbender depicts the magic as specifically dark, which is a major part of the push and pull between Izzy and her mother. Blood ties them together, something that represents both life and death, and as it turns out you can’t ever entirely separate them.
— SPOILER SECTION —
Horror is a genre that particularly relies on tropes so it’s not unexpected that most films would be fairly easy to predict. There are only so many ways the set up for Hellbender can turn out, and Izzy embracing her dark side is never really a surprise – in fact I’d say it feels inevitable from pretty early on, though you could argue about when. The second time she meets Amber, definitely. The first time, when she sneakily steals her hair clips. Even before that I was pretty sure the movie was signalling that path rather than Izzy being the innocent victim of a family’s dark legacy. It showed in how hard her mother tried to keep her separated from others, and the “vegetarian” meals of unfamiliar-to-most foraged plants seemed to harken to her mother (who, no, is never named – Izzy is very much the focus of the movie, another sign of what’s coming) being more of the Earth Mother, an it harm none, rule of three, type of witch. The Hellbenders are cyclical, too. Izzy rebels against her mother, while her mother rebelled against the darkness she was brought up in herself, and this theme is repeated in the lore of the Hellbenders themselves. Her mother mentions during their witchcraft lessons that Hellbenders are self-reproducing but never explains what she means, and though there are hints, we don’t explicitly find out for sure until the final scene.
If there are any major flaws I’d say that maybe Izzy’s growing darkness is perhaps a little over-choreographed in her mannerisms and mode of speech, particularly near the end, but you get the feeling that it’s more of a stylistic choice that simply isn’t to everyone’s tastes than poor execution. The theme and the story still pair closely together the whole way through, right up to the imagery in the ending sequence of Izzy’s mother crawling through a tunnel reminiscent of the birth canal. It’s mothers and daughters from start to finish.