God knows, no one gets an easy adolescence, but at least most of us are spared the lycanthropy. No such luck for Heather, the young woman at the centre of My Animal, one of three notable titles at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival that take on a favourite cinematic theme: the nightmare quality of pubescence and young adulthood, when the body is an alien thing and desire becomes a tangle of heated confusion and shame. From the Altered States program, My Animal shares some DNA with another Canadian film, 2000’s Ginger Snaps, bleeding its central metaphor (so to speak) to find poetic horror in awakening sexuality, but also suppressed female rage.

In this case, Heather (impressively underplayed by Bobbi Salvör Menuez) happens to be a hockey-obsessed tomboy in small town Ontario, apparently at some point in the ‘80s. The film’s strategy is to build an eerily timeless world, socked in by snow and forest darkness (The Company of Wolves comes to mind), until the arrival of a glaring anachronism called Jonny (Amanda Stenberg), a figure skater who comes to town with her own confused desires. The film is so low-key in the face of its own fantastique that even the great Stephen McHattie pulls back as Heather’s sympathetic father. Conversely, a cameo by Kid in the Hall Scott Thompson should be welcome but feels out-of-register, as do a couple other choices made by director Jacqueline Castel. Still, My Animal deserves your attention, which is heavily rewarded in the film’s final minutes when, with all hell about to break loose, Heather delivers the film’s climactic line to the deep satisfaction of the viewer. Again, so to speak.

Stir, September 2023