116 min | R | May 12, 2023 | Bleecker Street
Seventeen-year-old Jem Starling dances for God in a fundamentalist Kentucky community and aches to feel chosen. The new youth pastor offers her exactly that, and she mistakes his attention for grace. Laurel Parmet’s debut knows the difference between being seen and being prey.
Jem Starling is seventeen years old. She lives inside a fundamentalist Christian community in rural Kentucky where the church governs every choice. She dances in the worship troupe and frets that her faith has gone cold. Owen Taylor returns from missionary work as the new youth pastor, and Jem reads his attention as evidence that God finally sees her. The film makes no such mistake. It knows the difference between romance and grooming, and it tracks the exact moment a young woman learns to call a grown man’s predation a calling.
Eliza Scanlen plays Jem with a stillness that holds desire and confusion in the same expression. She lets Jem’s confidence curdle into shame and back again without telegraphing the shift. Lewis Pullman plays Owen as a man who has convinced himself first, and his genuine warmth makes the exploitation worse. Wrenn Schmidt gives Heidi, Jem’s mother, the brittle control of a woman policing her own doubts. Jimmi Simpson plays Paul Starling, the father, whose private collapse exposes the rot the community will not name. Austin Abrams plays Ben Taylor as the safe suitor Jem is supposed to want and cannot.
Laurel Parmet writes and directs her first feature with a refusal to sensationalize. The camera stays close to Jem and frames her in tight, shallow-focus shots that isolate her from the people around her. Parmet shoots the church dances as something between worship and performance, and the choreography exposes the contradiction of bodies offered to God and watched by men. The color palette stays muted and overcast, which keeps the film from romanticizing the rural setting. Parmet writes the dialogue so that every act of control sounds like love. That restraint is the whole point.
This is a film about a girl taught that her desire is a sin and her obedience is a virtue. It understands that the trap closes from inside and outside at once. Parmet never lets Owen become a simple villain or Jem a simple victim, and the refusal of easy moral lines gives the film its force. Jem’s eventual reach for agency arrives without triumph and without rescue. The film ends where her real life begins. It earns that ending by refusing every shortcut along the way.