It remains astonishing at times, the range of skills actors in modern movies are required to master. The young female leads in the tart Swedish teen drama She-Monkeys are meant to be keen exponents of vaulting, which requires the actresses involved to look not just comfortable but enthusiastic striking poses on the backs of horses going at a fair clip around the corral. Elsewhere, these girls will be seen clowning about (and plunging off) the high-dive board, and fooling around with a biathlon rifle. If you haven't as yet twigged the metaphor, this is adolescence as competitive, contact sport: an arena within which limber young bodies will be stretched this way and that, put to the test, and eventually - in one notable example - broken; it may be the only Swedish movie to evoke the spectre of Tonya Harding.
At the centre of Lisa Aschan's film is the friendship, and then the rivalry, that develops between two girls: Emma (Mathilda Paradeiser), the sensible, thoughtful new recruit to this afterschool gymkhana, and the club's queen bee/top dog/front rider Cassandra (Linda Molin), a harsh, glacial Nordic beauty - think the young Agnetha from ABBA, or a big-screen Saga Noren - whose smile reveals a pair of almost vampiric incisors. This is apt, because these two first bond while getting their teeth into the local boys, who don't know what to make of the pair's formidable collective confidence, but really, they only have eyes for one another - which gets tricky, when it turns out there are but limited places on this particular team.
There's an obvious thematic crossover here with Celine Sciamma's Water Lilies (with which She-Monkeys shares a UK distributor), though - as the new film's title suggests - Aschan's interest lies more in fauna than flora. An early sequence of Emma training her dog in the woods, and a rather graphic scene of equine coitus, set up just how keen the movie is to go off in pursuit of animal behaviour, and the way we pick up tics (and possibly ticks, given the background emphases on female grooming) from those around us. Emma's younger sister Sara (Isabella Lindquist), seen being ejected from a public swimming baths (and made to feel shameful) for refusing to wear a bikini top, comes home to spoon in bed with her oft-absent father; when the latter's not there, it seems entirely natural to her that she should proposition her teenaged male cousin, in a sequence that's simultaneously funny and weird.
The film is never quite as cruel as something like Breillat's À ma soeur!: it has time for these girls' giggly, conspiratorial pleasures, and those nights when they laugh so hard with one another they can't help but wet themselves. As with Sciamma's films, it's arguably more comfortable inhabiting the same space as its female leads than it is around anybody else (the parents remain somewhat hazy creations), and often plays less like conventional narrative cinema than a loose sequence of formative moments, a compilation of textures: skin on skin, water on skin, skin on sand. Vivid these moments and textures remain, though, beautifully rendered - perhaps played would be the better verb - by the young cast. We can see the women Emma and Cassandra are growing into, and the mistakes they're likely to make, if they don't or cannot correct themselves, and these 83 minutes are all too keenly informed by painful memories of just what it takes to be best in show.
She-Monkeys opens in selected cinemas from Friday.
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