Purgatory House

Rating R Formats DVD Genre drama Starring Celeste Davis, Jim Hanks, Devin Witt, Johnny Pacar, Rhiannon Main Directed by Cindy Baer Publisher Image Entertainment External Links Official Purgatory House Website

Purgatory House is not nearly as bad as you'd expect a film with the calling card "entirely written by a 14-year old girl" to be. Of course, all the melodramatic elements of pre-teen angst exist in abundance, but this modest indie success (shot entirely and edited on mini-DV) sports gems of humor, mature cynicism, and heart.

The concept behind this teen cautionary tale emerged when Baer met Davis in the big sister program and saw the troubled pre-teen struggle with an estranged home life, peer acceptance, and substance abuse over the ensuing years. Baer's bold decision to take Davis's script as is, adding only occasional prompting for pages to equal feature length, creates a unique work that also functions as art therapy for a distraught, creative teen perched precariously on the brink of despair.

Purgatory's premise is straight out of a freshman English allegory assignment or modernized Inferno: wayward teens who commit suicide are sentenced to Purgatory House, a halfway house with saintly "counselors", snarling cafeteria workers, and dorms that duplicate their rooms on earth. In a particularly ingenious touch of art direction, the kids are forced to wear the clothes and personalized accoutrements they died in, and their closets contain rows upon rows of the same outfit. The story centers around gothlet Silver Marie Strand (writer-star Celeste Marie Davis), with a name and wardrobe only a teenager could create. With her smudged black eye liner, silver cross jewelry, combat boots and miniskirts, her act could easily become clichéd and tiresome; but surprisingly, Davis manages to give her character sufficient cynicism, intelligence, and straight-forwardness that remove her from the "sullen outcast" box. Of course, the stereotypes of the non-conformist, "troubled" teen abound—flirting with hard drugs, teen sex, and general ennui with the status quo; but the candor of the writing and the acting balance things out.

Davis' amateurish overacting and stilted dialogue is sometimes laughable, but given the fact that professional actors in movies with much higher budgets can be much worse, her transgressions are forgivable. Jim Hanks (Tom's near spitting-image brother) is lukewarm as albino St. James, Silver's case worker/guardian angel, but truly shines in his dual role as God, envisioned as a neon-wigged, bitchy drag queen. Lamentably, the performances by the other teens are painfully bad—bordering on PSA/After-School-Special woodenness, and some scenes are so overly simplistic that it hurts. But overall, Davis and Baer emerge with a heartfelt, enjoyable piece of teen drama. The best part of the script is that Davis, even at her tender age, has the maturity to sit back and laugh at herself, as her character tires of putting on her characteristic eyeliner, dark lipstick, and teasing her frizzy blond curls—bored with the image that she sought so hard to create on earth and is doomed to live out for eternity.

Aside from its oversimplification of post-Columbine teenhood and garish blue-screen effects, Purgatory House proves that a filmmaker/ producer can accomplish a lot with a little. The set, sparse and cheesy, works perfectly because it is true to the dismal institutional setting created in the script. And this straightforward, somewhat predictable allegory has enough philosophical pondering, vitality, and camp value to entertain, if not impress with its humble beginnings and the earnestness of its cast and crew.