Our Scandie chums continue turning out coming-of-age sagas with the same regularity as they make murder-mysteries, but Girls Lost treads a distinctive path, suggesting how The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants might unfold as reworked by Björk and the coven in The Craft. Instead of anything so materialistic as jeans, it’s a rare and delicate orchid – Mother Nature! – which rallies its trio of teenage outsiders, a sign writer-director Alexandra-Therese Keining (adapting a Jessica Schiefauer novel) isn’t afraid to confront the florid strangeness of adolescence. We’re headed towards a through-the-looking-glass twist that changes these girls’ position in the lunchqueue pecking order, while begging debate in at least a half-dozen academic papers on Gender Fluidity in 21st Century Cinema. The hothouse atmosphere can turn languid, and Schiefauer’s tangled plotting perhaps needed extra pruning here and there, but its stronger stretches are shot like a midsummer night’s dream, and it’s engagingly played by a cast of young spirits-in-flux.
Girls Lost opens in selected cinemas tomorrow, ahead of its DVD release on December 5.
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