User Reviews

The wonderful young Rebecca Smart plays the title character, a nine year old growing up in the Australia of the late 1950s. Celia is imaginative and, unfortunately, unbalanced. She wants nothing so much as a pet rabbit, and yet the authorities have declared the species a pest. She enjoys playing with the children of the new next-door neighbors, and then her father (Nicholas Eadie) forbids her to play with them after they learn that the parents are members of the Communist party.

"Celia" is one of those gems that has somehow slipped through the cracks for the past 33 years; it's well worth seeing as it captures many of the facets of childhood, and how repeated traumas can send a kid over the edge. Strictly speaking, it's NOT really a horror film, as it might get promoted, although it certainly has creepy elements: Celia obsesses over creatures called "Hobyahs", which figure in a dark childrens' fable read to her in school. And sometimes she imagines seeing these creatures, also having nightmares about them.

Celia is a great character, but this viewer was not just sympathetic to her plight; the neighbors, too, are portrayed as real human beings with doubts and beliefs, and not cartoon bogeymen. Written and directed by Ann Turner, the film, at its best, is powerful and affecting, especially as it turns darker and darker towards the end. The finish is particularly disturbing.

The cast is excellent across the board, the music (by Chris Neal) is haunting, and overall "Celia" very efficiently depicts the realities of a specific place and time. It deserves exposure to a wider audience.

Eight out of 10.

Story in short. Celia Carmichael lives with her parents in a small village in Australia during the fifties. It starts sad as her grandmother dies with who she had a close bond (shown in a few flashbacks). She finds comfort with their new neighbours: a family with 3 kids and in a cute rabbit which she gets as birthday present. However several conflicts arise as her father doesn't want her to play with the neighbour's kids any more as their parents are communists. Because of a rabbit plague the police is also trying to confiscate the rabbits of all rabbit owners. Last but not least Celia and her friends are in a feud with some classmates lead by Stephanie Burke daughter of the local police officer.

Why is Celia such an interesting character? Well the director(and actress) does a hell of a job showing how versatile Celia as lead actually is. She can be a pretty bad girl when things don't go her way even though she is not the girl to pull pranks on others. She only acts with a certain revenge when she feels they did her or her friends injustice. On the other hand she also shows a very caring side in her scenes with her pet rabbit, how she stands up for her neighbours. And not to forget like every child she has fears which are cleverly shaped by some creepy muddy monsters, gotten from a story the school teacher read to the kids before the holidays started. No those monsters are not the real horror elements they exist only in her dreams and imagination. But the more disappointments she endures the more real they seem to become for her.

The real horror elements are shown in a few strong scenes which left quite some impression on me. I'm not going to give them away, without any gore or violence involved they struck me quite hard. It eventually leads to Celia doing a terrible thing and despite it was wrong I just couldn't condemn her. In the end only her best friend Heather was witness of Celia's crime even though I had the feeling her mother also found out.

This film made me uneasy. It's so real, so true to life, so light and so heavy, understated and over the top. It captures all the wild uneasiness and expression and off-center humanity of childhood, and makes it breathless and fully alive. It takes you all over the place. There's so many things going on, so many events and strange sights and sounds. The kids are swept along through some kind of strange journey, a backward and breathless running through life. This is not a horror film, or even a fantasy. It is a straightforward drama, that not only captures real life but delves deep into the sort of confused reality of imagination that children so often confuse with everything else.

This film made me uncomfortable. At times, it's alive and pure and safe and quiet. At other times, it's brash and explosive and emotionally uneasy. In the end, it's dark and deeply disturbed. You don't see it coming, but in a way, the ending colors everything that's come before. It's the believability that makes it so strange, so hard.

Rebecca Smart plays Celia. She shows a range of character that totally beyond expectation. She's confident, scared, awake, aware, confused. It takes a lot of time to understand all the complexities at work in her. Celia makes no sense, or maybe all too much. In the end, she becomes a more complete person. One who will live with things most of us could hardly even imagine.

Geoffrey Simpson's cinematography is totally realist. There's no strange photography, no experimentation. It's filmed like a regular story, without exaggeration. And it's all the better for it. This film's writer/director Ann Turner (who's done little else of note), creates a strange and powerful story with her understanding of character. She pushes through all of her strangest, most uneasy ideas without ever making you feel like you're not seeing real lives. Chris Neal creates some strongly effective music. It is at once timeless and perfectly fitting. It sounds little like any movie music I'd previously heard, but quite exactly fitting to the images. Otherworldly without feeling out of place.

"Celia" is not an average film. It sees and expresses things in a way utterly like any other in the history of film. It has no peers in this sense, and that alone makes it one of the most powerful cinematic experiences I've ever had. But the nature in how it grafts darkness to light, fear to joy, is disconcerting. If you still remember childhood, you can find yourself in the scenes of "Celia". This is not sensationalism. This is one little girl's precarious existence.

Cult Cuts Volume 18 (80s Horror Retrospective #2)

#4/4: Celia (1989) (Spoiler Warning)

(7/10):Another Aussie offering but this time in more of a psychological character study of a somewhat disturbed young girl with a large imagination who has to grow up in the middle of the great bunny crisis and living with the thought of having her pet bunny taken from her.

It's a very strange story that shows creatures created by her vivid imagination but not very much as she moreso gets in many fights with the other kids who are actively trying to get her in trouble and even trying to take her bunny away themselves.

She even actively tries and protests the act of pet bunnies being taken away from their owners and demonizes their leader.

She does have it taken away but later it gets overturned and she is able to get her bunny back only to find it had died and from there she begins to become more begrudging about this and even bands together with her friends to plan out revenge.

This is when the horror begins to come more into play as she starts to see reality differently and becomes unable sometimes to differentiate between reality and imagination, and she shoots a man dead.

It ends on a cliffhanger of them leaving after discussing how they are going to lynch the man responsible for her bunnies death.

The presentation is quite good and handled in a very mature manner and the performances are very well done.

The character of Celia is someone that you easily feel bad for but are also genuinely shocked when she takes a much darker turn.

The score is also very fitting and sets the tone for the film perfectly.

It does also really reflect its era but not necessarily in the way that many would consider quintessential Eighties Horror but as it seems to reflect some of the political fallout from the Cold War which was starting to come to its end in the late eighties/early nineties.

So how does it hold up? Quite well frankly, it's not an absolute masterpiece of horror but it's quite chilling and well made.

Firstly, this story is set in Victoria - not South Australia - as can be demonstrated from the name of the state Premier, Sir Henry Bolte. Next, the children aren't playing in a desert, but rather the local abandoned industrial sandpit. It is her dead grandmother who had been a communist rather than her parents who are opposed and working hard at cutting all ties - including burning gran's library and banning Celia from playing with the kids of their 'Commie' new neighbours.

The rather bizarre choice of storybook read to the class by their teacher and which has Celia enthralled by its demonic 'hobbyars' is "A Sweet Obscurity" by Patrick Gale. Ultimately, her confusion between her terrified obsession with these monsters of the dark and the real world in which she must do battle with the "Powers That Be" trying to oppress, corrupt and destroy everything she loves - her memories of her communist grandmother, her friends next door, her pet rabbit, Murgatroyd - lead to her own mini-revolution and act of murder and the equally riveting scene where she terrorises the only witness (a weak-willed playmate) into lifelong silence.

The story is in many respects so 'strange' as to seem based in reality - almost as if the author is making a confession about a crime in childish innocence committed as Celia. I don't know that I wanted the story to end in any way on a light-hearted note. The tragedy seemed likely to leave a lasting hole in several lives - unlikely to be reparable by a kiss or a hug.

I recently found this movie as a throw-out sale item at the video store and it rekindled memories of when I'd first seen it on TV. Unfortunately, the name is not memorable - a flaw the producers should be warned of with any film the fans are likely to seek out. I had only vaguely remembered the 'hobbyars' as 'blue meanies' as in the Beatles film 'Yellow Submarine' - which wasn't much help for a search. It is not likely to be a widely available film even in Australia and if you have a copy, then you're lucky.

On the surface it is a depressing story about a girl who seems to have trouble telling the difference between the real world and make believe. She sees monsters when bad things happen, which is a nice metaphor. But it takes a serious turn when she has a shotgun in her hands.

Digging a little deeper it's a feminist perspective on home life for a young girl and her mother. And the situations that unfold when a new family moves in next door with a pretty but independent-thinking neighbor's wife.

The drama around the danger of the neighbors being communist was surprising. As well as the misogyny from the young heroine's father. It all works up towards an ominous conclusion so it's never boring. But where it goes is quite unsettling.

The children in her neighborhood school are no less brutal and political than my childhood was. But it's a very dark story for a group of pre-teens.

Girl has visions of monsters after her grandma dies, and tho they're not real, she reacts to one of these episodes in violent manner, having endured the loss of her friends, pets, and trust in her father.. communist propaganda makes it seems as if all they want is peace, and everyone else is out to get them.. during the film, analogy to Australian rabbit crisis of the 1950's.. so it's pretty involved, but the punchline is that this makes her into a bad seed, environment over genetics.. great acting, good subplots and characterization, and turmoil galore.. is this a horror film? Psychologically so, because Celia becomes the thing she claims to have hated.