Strange Girls (2007)

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

With strong shadings of the real life case of the notorious Gibbons Twins,(LINKS: http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/stage-visual- arts/tragic-tale-of-twins-and-their-secret-world-1.1045865 and http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20094856,00.html )gritty Pittsburgh locations accent this quirky, well-made independent effort. While darkly tongue-in-cheek, Strange Girls spans several genres - character study, romance, and slasher -with unexpected plot points and an ambiguous ending. It somehow manages to get where it's going, maintaining credibility along the way, even though it misses the opportunity that its unique premise dangles for the sorts of twists and turns which could make it more sophisticated and eerily engrossing.Strange Girls brings a tale of two sisters who share a deep psychological bond along with their contemptuous hatred of everyone and everything in the world at large. Committed since early childhood, conducting all of their activities in synchronized unison including walking together in lock-step, Virginia and Georgia (Angela and Jordan Berliner) are insular, eccentric, taciturn -they haven't uttered a word to anyone in years, discounting their own clandestine, cloistered communications to each other in an invented language.The duo suffers delusions of artistic grandeur: they are jointly authoring a misguided and amateurishly melodramatic, epic romance novel on the scale of Norma Desmond's Greek odyssey-length, Salome, in the 1950 noir classic, Sunset Boulevard. Virginia and Georgia yearn for independence so they can contrive their own poetically idealized, Boho- chic existence -but not by adjusting to their surroundings. Rather, the twins shall compel their surroundings to "adjust" to themselves.Strange Girls begins by following in detail, the arrival of a freshly- minted psychiatrist (Adrienne Wehr) whose first assignment is to unravel the twin's enigma and get them to open up. But Strange Girls isn't about her challenges in doing so; in an abrupt and disorienting opening twist, the twins murder her when they discover she is going to delay their discharge. Obfuscating damning documents and forging new ones, Virginia and Georgia scheme a probationary release.The girls set up housekeeping in a claustrophobic flat rented from a crotchety old biddy of a totalitarian landlady, who with a single complaint, wields the power to send the sisters right back to the booby- hatch. To make matters worse, due to state budget constraints, the apartment is located in a less than ideal section of Pittsburgh. It's not exactly the quaintly trendy, elite neighborhood of Shadyside. Rather, it's more like John Waters's anti-idealized, decrepit Baltimore, replete with a cavalcade of aggressive lowlifes and downtrodden deviants.The sisters endure unpleasant run-ins with a hodgepodge of eccentric and garishly trashy local denizens, while staging an idyllic facade for their timid, unrealistically optimistic caseworker (Joanna Lowe). Then a new element injects itself into their conundrum: Virginia finds a boyfriend, Oyo (Andre Delawrence Rice Jr.). The trouble is, Oyo can't tell the twins apart. Up to now, the two sisters have managed to live in unison as one person. But this was in a controlled, and limited environment. With the array of new options which the outside world avails to them, the gruesome twosome discovers they're not as mutually in-tune as they have imagined -with horrid results.

Strange Girls seared itself into my mind, and I absolutely mean that in a good way. I saw it only once, almost a year ago, and scenes from it still haunt me. Right from the opening titles (which are colorfully set over an accidental-suicide-by-autoerotic-asphyxiation) you know you're in for a disturbing evening. Writer-Director Mark does an excellent job of taking characters who do reprehensible, psychopathic things, and making them sympathetic. She's assisted in this endeavour by overall good performances, some of which stand out as being exceptional -- the twins themselves for example, played by real life sisters Angela and Jordana Berliner, pull off the difficult roles of the title characters with believability and power. The performances of Alem Brhan Sapp and Andre Delawrence Rice Jr., as two brothers whom the twins torment, also stand out. Any flaws in the movie are too minor to mention and, I suspect, the fault only of a tight budget, so I give it a well-deserved ten stars. And it made me never want to visit Pittsburgh, which I also mean in a good way.Summing up: if John Waters had sex with Alfred Hitchcock, they'd give birth to these Strange Girls.

Definitely the creepiest movie to play at 2008's STIFF festival---and definitely more psychologically disturbing than gory (although there's certainly some splashes of THAT too). The two twins really start to get under your skin on their first appearance, and they come home with you and stay in your head long after the final reel. Everything is spot-on, from the atmosphere of a struggling-looking Pittsburgh to the sad-eyed, somehow knowingly hopeless feeling you can read in the faces of even the minor characters. And surprisingly, what makes this such a strange little gem is that while it never loses its fundamental darkness throughout, glimmers of humor are always present---just in case you start to feel a little too uneasy in your theater seat

Full marks go to Rona Mark for doing the right thing as both director/writer and one of the producers.But be warned if you expect big budget and special effects then this will not be your thing.If you have a small budget then the two things that you really need are the right script and the right actors. I've seen far too many films flutter their budgets away on one special effect to the severe detriment of both plot and or wooden acting.This doesn't mean that the acting in Strange Girls is perfect but it's damn close to what can be achieved on budget.The plot also doesn't utilise expensive sets or locations and although some scenes (notably the psychiatric hospital) - look like a redress of another location the plot and characters yet again allow the viewer to be absorbed into the story.Mark also spends time developing her characters into fully fledged individuals and this can be noted by the time she spends on Dr Karp only to watch her die during the first reel and taking a step towards breaking some of the hard and fast set rules.The film is also funny as you watch the sisters become involved in stranger and stranger situations taking sibling rivalry to an new level.Cinematography is also good and together with music some clever moments of tension are realised (especially Max in the girls' house).This together with a liking of all the characters (whether good or bad) makes this a great movie.