The Little Pakeha

Hellbender

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.