Reviews

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  ★★★★½ review by brat pitt on Letterboxd

  not to be dramatic but diverse, female-centric cinema is literally the only thing i will ever care about for the rest of my life

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  ★★★★★ review by nathaxnne walker on Letterboxd

  When we are there when nothing else is.
  
  When we are not there when everything else is.
  
  When we are not, what is where we were?
  
  What stands or moves in, in its place?

  
  
  The Fits, more than any other movie I think I have seen, knows what it is like to be alone or nearly alone in institutional spaces when no one else is there, when the building has been closed or is winding down its operations for the day or if parts of it have been abandoned recently or all human activity moved to another area. It knows that is a form of haunting, of what was immediately present now gone, having left artifacts scattered in its wake or having placed them in order prior to departure. It is like when the sun is going down but the heat is held in the land only for it to be slowly exhaled during the night.

  The Fits knows that to be an adolescent is to pass from the structures of the immediate family to a larger wilderness of different kinds of loneliness and belonging and that this too is a haunting, not simply of the immediate past of childhood, but also a state of being haunted by the future self, the adult-in-becoming, itself a fraught and perilous process to navigate.

  The fact that The Fits takes place in the warm and homelike but ultimately liminal space of the Lincoln Community Center, and not primarily in a school or in the homes of the kids means that it knows it is centered in a communal space, but one passed through on the way to somewhere else, a space which cannot be remained in.

  The Fits is a movie which revolves about our daily hauntings, our comings and goings, our presences and absences, entering into and passing away from the surety and the knowledge of what it means to be ourselves when alone and with others, what it means to be that within a family, a group of friends, a larger world, and how we fit in and do not fit at all, how we drop in and drop out of these endlessly shifting configurations which provide the context for and against what we are and what we can be.

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  ★★★★½ review by Lucy on Letterboxd

  me during every single shot: A SHOT

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  ★★★★ review by Katie on Letterboxd

  girls are so beautiful and wonderful and I love all of them

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  ★★★★½ review by Josh Larsen on Letterboxd

  Negotiating the onset of adolescence can be a tricky thing — for kids, obviously, but also for filmmakers. Some sugarcoat it. Others exploit it. Many wrap it in a glaze of syrupy nostalgia. With The Fits, first-time feature director Anna Rose Holmer does something I haven’t seen before. She captures approaching adolescence for what it really is: an out-of-body experience. (Full review here.)

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