Leave old film notions behind

And what are we to make of the Aurochs, prehistoric beasts Hushpuppy learns about in her classroom and whom she imagines breaking free of their glacial prisons during the apocalypse? First-time feature director Benh Zeitlin and his co-writer Lucy Alibar interweave their strands so gracefully that the movie feels like it’s simultaneously unfolding in the now and forever. In the storm’s aftermath, the remaining inhabitants of the Bathtub band together for a survivors’ party, then hunker down to resist the government’s attempts to evacuate them. There’s a sequence involving an alligator’s corpse loaded with dynamite that comes close to outsider art, half “Pogo” and half heroic mural. The movie testifies to an urge for freedom that exists almost at the molecular level.

By the way, who are the outsiders here? Hushpuppy and her companions or the filmmakers, white college kids (Zeitlin went to Wesleyan) who have reimagined a world that isn’t their own? Accusations of exploitation and well-intentioned classism have been leveled at “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” but the charges don’t stick. There’s too much empathy in the film’s overwhelming profusion of detail, in the characters that seem both life-size and larger than life, and, besides, the filmmakers aren’t trying to make a documentary. They’re working at something harder and more holy: the poetry of existence burned directly onto film. To come from the summer’s dull superhero juggernauts into this movie is to rediscover the creative fires of youth and the passion of people truly alive to what they see.

That’s why some audiences, conditioned to the cues mainstream films give us, may have trouble responding. “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is hardly avant-garde, and its narrative is easy to suss out, but it plays by its own rules and it’s consciously, intuitively a shambles. You have to give up your willpower and let the film roll over you like kudzu. If you try to hack away at it, you’ll be exhausted in minutes.

Eventually, Hushpuppy makes it to that floating castle — the trip out there, with a grizzled local fisherman, feels like a calm in the eye of the storm — and she meets a woman who may or may not be her mother, who may or may not be a dream. By now, it seems like “Beasts of the Southern Wild” can’t get any wilder, richer, weirder, but it does, climbing up the rungs of exaltation as the girl leaves behind a broken patriarchal childhood for a mystical communion with the Mother of us all. At the beginning of the film, she’s just a kid. By the end, she’s a tribal elder whose knowledge seems unimaginably vast.