The Starling Girl                4 stars

The Starling Girl, the first feature film from director Laurel Parmet appeared at this year’s Sundance and was just released in theaters. It concerns a young seventeen-year-old girl, Jem Starling (Eliza Scanlen of Little Women and Sharp Objects) who is coming of age in a small rural town in Kentucky where she and her parents are part of a fundamentalist congregation. Jem is very devout in her faith, but is starting to realize her sexuality and the limits placed on her in this patriarchal society. She takes pride in the dance troupe she is in, but must heed the warnings from adults not to make it about her and to keep God first. One must be very careful in this setting as straying from the fold can result in requiring a confession in front of the congregation and being sent to a disciplinary camp for rehabilitation. Owen Taylor (Lewis Pullman), a handsome thirty-year-old youth pastor returns from an assignment in Puerto Rico with his wife, having a deep impact on Jem’s world. It is then that the story takes a darker turn with Jem pursuing a relationship with the pastor which he is all too willing to accommodate. The naïve Jem sees it as part of God’s plan to get them together while the audience knows what Owen is up to and that only disaster can result. To some extent the story is predictable, but it is made believable because of the acting ability of the young Eliza Scanlen. I don’t know anything about Laurel Parmet’s background but the film was useful in framing the Christian fundamentalist view of life and the outside world and of the effect on young people within the fundamentalist community.