One Good Film: "The Fits" (2016)

Anna Rose Holmer's drama of a young girl eyeing adulthood with poise and alarm remains a little-known modern masterpiece.

Jul 10, 2023

A regular feature for paid Watch List subscribers: I suggest one reasonably under-the-radar movie from the recent or distant past, and you do what you want with that information.

The Fits (2016, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐, streaming on Paramount+ and Kanopy, for rent on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, and YouTube)— One of those little miracle movies that seems to have come out of nowhere, “The Fits” was the debut feature of the young writer-director Anna Rose Holmer. Lifting off from a news item about an epidemic of seizures among teenage girls in rural North Carolina in 2002, the film relocates that narrative to inner-city Cincinnati and the turmoil inside Toni, a preadolescent girl whose self-sufficient aloneness is upended when she finds herself yearning to be part of a competitive drill team made up of older girls. “Suddenly she wants to be one of them,” I wrote in my Boston Globe review when the film was released, “older, worldly, sexy, belonging.” But belonging to what?

“The Fits” has wordplay buried in its title: It’s about fitting in, but it’s also about the unexplained seizures that first hit one of the drill team members, then another, then another, until the phenomenon is leaking onto the local news on the community center’s lobby TV. Is it something in the water? Adolescent hysteria? “The Crucible” in Cincinnati? “The Fits” is loosely based on actual events, but it hovers on the edges of fable and urban legend, Holmer’s gaze locked tightly into her characters’ frame of reference.

A young actress with the fabulous name of Royalty Hightower (above) plays Toni as a regal outsider coming to grips with an insecurity she’s never experienced before.

Toni’s response is both shocked and fascinated. You sense she’s wondering: Is this part of adulthood? Is this the jolt I have to suffer in crossing over from childhood? Or even: Am I somehow the cause of this? The movie could be an anthropological study if the director weren’t so empathetic toward her heroine and if Hightower didn’t reward that empathy with a performance of pure presence. The entire movie is present, actually, in ways we rarely see in our filmed entertainments.

It's one of those rare movies you experience in a haze of its own happening – I did, anyway – because Holmer and her lead actress never stoop to explain the drama. They simply let it unfold with a subtextual clarity that provides its own form of exhilaration: You get what’s happening at the same time Toni does.

Holmer captures a strong, silent young woman’s rite of passage with grace notes of humanity, even humor: Toni piercing her ears in the community center’s bathroom as her friends comment and help out; her brother looking aghast at those pierced ears and muttering “Mom’s gonna kill me.” (Not her — him.) And there’s a wordless sequence on a grimy pedestrian overpass in which Toni starts sparring the air and her movements turn to dance and suddenly she’s finding her own real groove. I wouldn’t trade that scene for any other moment onscreen this year.

Since “The Fits” came out in 2016, Anna Rose Holmer has made just one movie, last year’s “God’s Creatures,” which has fine performances from Emily Watson and Paul Mescal as a mother and her terrible son but lacks the dreamlike immediacy of the debut. Hightower appeared in one other film in 2017 and nothing since. Note to film investors and casting agents: It would do all of us a world of good to hear from either (or both) of these two again, and soon.

I hope you enjoy the movie. Don’t hesitate to weigh in with thoughts.

Ty Burr's Watch List

One Good Film: "The Fits" (2016)

Anna Rose Holmer's drama of a young girl eyeing adulthood with poise and alarm remains a little-known modern masterpiece.