American Fable

Summary

A young girl in a small farming community befriends a man that is held captive by her parents in an old grain silo.

Buttonface Says…

Every once in a while I accidentally trick myself into watching something that I normally wouldn’t watch. This time I think it was laziness. You see, my wife and I were out pretty late last night, which led to another lazy Saturday of me nodding on and off on my bed watching movies.

I had just finished watching The Ritual and this movie, I thought, was suggested to me by my sometimes confused Netflix account. So I started it.

Buttonface Character

It was a little slow getting off the ground, so I nodded in and out picking up part of the story. Eventually, I was invested in the tidbits I had acquired and reeled my way back and picked it up from the start.

This is not a horror film. It’s barely a thriller. It has some “Thriller-ey” elements to it, but if I had to call it anything, I might call it a “slight-modern-fantasy”… Imagine Tideland only very watered down, or maybe a little Fisher-King-ish.

There is a very serious storyline going on, but we only get bits of it through the eyes of a very imaginative child. Imaginative to the point of verging on hallucinations, what I guess could be referred to as “through the eyes of an unreliable narrator”. Eventually, we discover the story and the reality of the situation becomes clear to the child as well.

American Fable is well acted and well written, but it defies genre and therefore is going to have a hard time finding an audience… but it is a good watch. But then again, I like everything.