SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL

When Adele’s family sends her to care for her rich, reclusive Aunt Dora, it is just what the young woman wanted: finally an escape, finally freedom. Yet she has hardly arrived in the Victorian villa, when a shadow falls over the scenery: the agoraphobic aunt neither leaves her room nor speaks with Adele. Instead she communicates through notes that she pushes under the door. Her niece has to work and live according to strict rules, and under no circumstances is she to bring anyone else into the house. In the beginning, Adele adheres meticulously to all the instructions. One day, however, when the girl with the porcelain complexion meets the wild, independent Beth and the two women become closer, boundaries are transgressed and rules broken – with unimagined consequences. Director A.D. Calvo clearly modeled this atmospherically charged horror film on supernatural Gothic chillers of the seventies, such as “Let’s Scare Jessica to Death” (see the special program “steirischer herbst”): a sinister coming-of-age novel between dancing dust motes, long shadows, and creaking floorboards about the rebellion of a new love against banal conventions and outmoded procedures. A small film that has fallen out of time. Wonderful.