Anne at 13,000 Feet

In jobs that pri­mar­i­ly entail wran­gling gag­gles of unruly tod­dlers, the pearl of advice often impart­ed is to ​“be child­like, not child­ish.” Anne (Der­agh Camp­bell, no longer Canada’s best-kept act­ing secret), the cyclone of arrest­ed devel­op­ment whirling at the cen­tre of Kazik Radwanski’s exact­ing new char­ac­ter study, has been hav­ing trou­ble with that distinction.

At the day­care where she’s sup­posed to be help­ing main­tain a friend­ly sense of order, her imma­tu­ri­ty makes her an ide­al play­mate for the kids and a frus­trat­ing cowork­er for her fel­low adults. Her sense of inno­cent won­der comes in handy when gin­ger­ly han­dling but­ter­flies with the lit­tle ones, but behav­ing like a 10-year-old stuck in the body of a woman cre­ates fric­tion with the stick­lers in man­age­ment. By the time she responds to a reminder that hot bev­er­ages aren’t allowed under safe­ty reg­u­la­tions by whip­ping her cup at anoth­er employ­ee, there’s no ignor­ing that she may not be cut out for the grown-up world.

Rad­wan­s­ki places her at odds with a soci­ety that can’t make sense of her awk­ward pres­ence, self-involved choic­es, or antag­o­nis­tic streak – though he puts in the effort to do so. The trem­bling close-ups in which he shoots Campbell’s reserved yet expres­sive face offer the first sig­nal that she’s under just as much men­tal strain as she caus­es any­one else, if not more.

While the film shies away from any spe­cif­ic psy­cho­log­i­cal lan­guage, it’s evi­dent that some man­ner of neu­ro­di­ver­gence fills dai­ly life with dif­fi­cul­ties for Anne. (Her moth­er, in the patient yet bor­der­line exas­per­at­ed tone of voice reserved for loved ones in seri­ous need, oblique­ly men­tions a past clin­ic stay.) Rad­wan­s­ki and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Niko­lay Michaylov repro­duce her pres­surised head­space with their claus­tro­pho­bic cam­er­a­work, in har­mo­ny with Ajla Odobasic’s dis­ori­ent­ing edit­ing schemes that cross-cut scenes with­in one anoth­er and ditch tran­si­tions eas­ing the view­er along. The over­whelm­ing sen­sa­tion that may result, and the dis­tress that comes with it, amounts to a vic­ar­i­ous expe­ri­ence of tax­ing empathy.

That’s more than she can expect from most of the peo­ple in her orbit, each of whom finds their own lim­it of how much Anne they can take. She has a meet-drunk with a well-mean­ing guy (Matt John­son, cult-favourite cre­ator of Oper­a­tion Avalanche and Nir­vana the Band the Show) at a friend’s wed­ding, only to show up at his flat unan­nounced and bring him to meet her fam­i­ly unan­nounced. In his grad­ual shy­ing-away, a lam­en­ta­ble inverse pro­por­tion­al­i­ty comes into focus: the more des­per­ate­ly Anne needs help, the less inclined oth­ers are to go through the labor of pro­vid­ing it.

She finds inner peace only while tum­bling through the air sky­div­ing, sug­gest­ing that her act­ing out stems from a lack of stim­u­la­tion in the dull respon­si­bil­i­ties of adult­hood. When­ev­er she gets a rise out of some­one else and they begin to push back, she hides behind the shame-faced schoolchild’s excuse that it was just a joke. ​“Joke” may not be the mot juste, but she’s being hon­est that her desire was sim­ply to enliv­en the fid­gety tedi­um. The com­pas­sion she earns, as in the excru­ci­at­ing pas­sage that sees her regale some rugrats with the sto­ry of her cat’s descent into mad­ness and death, tem­pers our rela­tion to the aggra­va­tion she prompts.

Campbell’s fear­less­ness, in both her abra­sion and the frag­ile human­i­ty behind her chaos, helps strike this del­i­cate bal­ance. To lean into every­thing alien­at­ing about Anne, and then to locate the deep­er per­son­hood inde­pen­dent of it – the dif­fer­ence between what she does, and who she is – requires a tremen­dous leap of faith. And unlike her char­ac­ter, she didn’t have a parachute.