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It’s quite challenging to watch Imitation Girl, the most recent film from writer and director Natasha Kermani, and not recall the 2013 sci-fi film Under the Skin. In both films, an enigmatic actor comes from the heavens above onto the Earth and learns what it means to be human. Both films have an unusually slow and methodical pacing, focused more on evoking mystery and introspection rather than emotional commitment or violence. Both films feature strange black goo that caves in our thoughts. For crying out loud, even the marketing for both films is very similar. However, resemblance is not the best marker when it comes to differentiating these two films, meaning that Kermani has not just directed some sort of cheap carbon copy. Imitation Girl stands on its own.
On top of being a master of indie horror, Lauren Ashley Carter also plays Julianna, a drug-using adult film actress, who is trying to find herself in the world. She also stars as the titular character in Imitation Girl, who, as a liquid creature, comes to Earth and performs first contact with a skin magazine that features a photograph of Julianna on the cover. The alien then assumes Julianna’s body and is captured by an Iranian shopkeeper (Neimah Djourabchi) and his sister (Sanam Erfani), who teaches her how to disguise herself as a human. From there, she travels to New York to meet Julianna. The outcome is rather intriguing.
I’m already a mark for Carter, who seems to be captivating in every movie she is acting (which is positive because I have a liking for the type of movies she acts in). Here, her work is the whole show: broken and lost as Julianna, wide-eyed (which is saying something for Carter who is already so big and so expressive) and curious as Imitation Girl. I love too that Kermani makes the choice to have IG interact during impersonation as an Iranian immigrant, and he writes half of the movie’s dialogue in Farsi. Partly because it prevents the obvious situation of us watching the movie through the perspective of an American born white people who, as Djourabchi’s character portrays, life as an immigrant is unique. The manner in which Imitation Girl is, is beauty, and that is that Carter moves from being a blank slate to appreciating mankind in just half of her performance; the fact that she is allowed to create a different character who is falling apart in a manner that is, indeed, stunning and so truthful.
Though Kermani doesn’t try to convey something as silly as vague, he does keep the audience guessing and certainly does not wrap things with a bow. Each part of Carter’s storyline functions independently, telling a story that is identifiable and emotional, and on its own has unique stakes as well. These different pieces come together to tell an encompassing story of appreciation and self-doubt. There’s a great scene in which Julianna expresses doubt and regret about her career where a producer/director provides a simplistic answer which at first seems like cruel manipulation but is entirely reasonable. It is about the statements made when someone is in an emotional rut, like Julianna. The journey of the film is accepting self-identity and feelings of praise and appreciation. And sometimes all it takes is a porn producer or an alien to make someone realize it.
Imitation Girl was the first film to be picked by the new Dread Central Presents label, which is an offshoot of Epic Pictures, the studio behind films like Nina Forever, Big Ass Spider and my personal favorite Turbo Kid. It is an interesting pairing, because it doesn’t seem like a horror film, but I do appreciate that they are backing something that is more complex and harder to define, as well as a voice like Natasha Kermani. Imitation Girl is a film that makes me so ecstatic to see what Kermani does next. There is so much talent on display here, both in her visual sense and in her patient control of tone, that she has immediately captured my attention and is now a filmmaker to watch. And Kermani clearly knows what she is doing, because the only thing better than a movie with a Lauren Ashley Carter performance is a movie with two.
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