What kind of movie is The Fits? Even after the credits roll, that’s not an easy question to answer. It begins as a study in isolation. We watch young Toni (Royalty Hightower), an athletic 11-year-old living in Cincinnati, work out at a local rec center and largely avoid interacting with others. Nearly ten minutes pass before we hear Toni speak and even then she mostly tries to say as little as possible. A tomboy who’s easily intimidated by older girls, she nonetheless decides to try out for a disciplined dance troupe that practices close to where she trains as a boxer. Despite her interest, she changes alone in the bathroom stall and listens to others gossip as if trying to decode how the world of older, girlier girls works. She’s relaxed around her older brother and uncomfortable in just about every other scenario.
It plays like a quiet, well-observed, and stylishly made character study. Then the ground starts to shift beneath Toni, and beneath the film itself. Mid-practice, one of the older girls is stricken by a seizure and collapses to the ground as the ominous ambient music swells on the soundtrack. Another, similar incident follows, and they start to mount even as Toni makes friends. And as the world around her seems to grow more dangerous, Toni becomes more relaxed. She makes friends first with one girl, then another. She learns to transfer the skills that she picked up boxing and apply them to dance. Her life gets better, even as those around her fall to the unexplained events. Sometimes their seizures look like trances. Sometimes they look like spasms. And sometimes they look like dancing.
At times, it feels like writer/director Anna Rose Holmer, helming her first narrative feature, is steering The Fits into horror movie territory. Using shallow focus and meting out scary moments between the mundane routines of dance rehearsal, she creates an unsettling atmosphere in which something always seems a little off. Toni’s innate uneasiness starts to shift to the world around her as the grown-ups start to worry about what’s causing the seizures, even though their effects seem to pass leaving the girls — and its victims are only girls — unscathed once they recover.
Is it a disease? Maybe, shades of Flint, something in the water? (Set in a largely black neighborhood, The Fits creates a sense that, just as Toni feels cut off from the other girls, its residents feel cut off from the larger world.) Perhaps some kind of mass hysteria? Maybe just a free-floating metaphor for puberty?
Holmer isn’t interested in answering any of those questions and, in the charming Hightower, she’s found the perfect actress to play the expressive, but enigmatic protagonist. And, just like its heroine, The Fits never gets swallowed up by the darkness that surrounds it. Toni is the quintessential moody outsider, but that doesn’t mean she wants to stay that way forever. And though change and the simple passing of time can be as scary in their own ways as some untraceable affliction, here the horror stays at a distance, if it ever really exists at all.
The Fits is now playing in New York before expanding to L.A. next week then rolling out across the country.
