Leave old film notions behind

By TY BURR
BOSTON GLOBE

Here is why some of us love the movies: They let you see with brand new eyes. Not all the time, and not even often. Usually, the eyes are tired or cynical or cowed by the need to turn a profit; they let us see only what we’re used to seeing in a film, not what it’s possible to see. And it takes a very special sensibility to try to see something impossible.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” is that miracle, a movie that shows us an entire new continent unexpectedly close to home. It’s probable that the hype (including this review) will have got to you and that you’ll greet “Beasts” — terrible title, by the way — with confusion or a shrug. I hope not. Bring no expectations of how movies, especially this one, are supposed to behave.

Rather than tell a straightforward story, “Beasts” steeps us in a place and its people: the Bathtub, a small hamlet clinging to the edge of coastal Louisiana. It’s more a state of human entropy than an actual village. The houses are nailed together from driftwood and tin scraps; dirt roads are carved out of overgrowth; there’s no difference between what’s useful and what’s junk. It’s chaos and it’s a community.

We take it in through the eyes of Hushpuppy, a 6-year-old girl played by Quvenzhané Wallis in a performance that grows in majesty as the movie progresses. Her thoughts, hushed and verging on the precious, fill the soundtrack. She’s trying to make sense of this world, and the movie, pitched between realism and fable, is the story of how she finally does.

That balance is the key to the movie’s magic. We’re in a real location, in a real year — 2005, and Hurricane Katrina is bearing down on New Orleans — but also in a place beyond history. Hushpuppy lives with her father Wink (Dwight Henry) in a pair of ramshackle trailers, and we have to pick out the specifics of their relationship the way you’d find your way across an uncleared lot. The dad is harsh but loving and fiercely protective. He’s ill with a heart condition that’s both medical and mythological. The girl’s mother is gone, either dead or exiled to a floating island whose lights steadily blink on the horizon. Even Hushpuppy’s gender seems indeterminate at first.