Pagan poetry: "Girls Lost"

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 21^st 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.