Raves for Anna Rose Holmer’s Feature Debut, The Fits

The young up and comer Anne Rose Holmer’s new film The Fits is receiving rave reviews, and currently sits at 96%. It goes almost without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that female writer/directors don’t often achieve high critical acclaim, and when they do they are often hit with over-hype so that audiences then tear it apart. You can ascribe any definition to it you want but this is the dynamic I see play out again and again, such that people who are hoping for there to be equal voices from women who are appreciated as much as their male counterparts are often disappointed. Why is it, for instance, that young men can so wholly commit to worshipping a filmmaker like Paul Thomas Anderson but can’t do the same with Sofia Coppola who, arguably, experiments with style and voice much the same way? That is probably a discussion for a brilliant sociology professor. Either which way, it’s always a great thing when a woman breaks through and it looks, at least for now, that Anna Rose Holmer has made a mark.

Manohla Dargis of the New York Times calls The Fits “A graceful tale of a girl who follows her own beat,” which can be interpreted a applying to the main character or perhaps the director.

“The Fits,” a dreamy, beautifully syncopated coming-of-age tale, takes place in and around a recreational center that could not look less inviting. It’s the usual impersonal slab, the kind that municipalities have been building for decades to educate, or sometimes just to warehouse, restless young bodies and minds. The girls who congregate at this particular center in Cincinnati, though, have their own desires, which they express with fists and feet, grace and power. They move — fluidly, ferociously and with escalating mystery — to their own transporting beat.

Her closing paragraph is a whopper:

As Toni shifts between the boxing club (she helps her brother clean up) and the dance team, “The Fits” seems to be inching into perilously schematic ground. There’s something altogether too neat-sounding about a story in which a prepubescent girl overtly coded as a tomboy travels back and forth — with inquisitiveness and periodic unease — between these distinctly gendered spaces. The miracle of the movie is that, like Toni, it transcends blunt, reductive categorization partly because it’s free of political sloganeering, finger wagging and force-fed lessons. Any uplift that you may feel won’t come from having your ideas affirmed, but from something ineluctable – call it art.

The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern:

We hear her counting reps under her breath before we see her doing them, 25 sit-ups in all, hands clasped behind head, radiant face to the camera, an 11-year-old named Toni—played by a dazzling youngster named Royalty Hightower—going up and down and up and down with ferocious determination. That’s the opening shot of “The Fits,” and it goes on and on for almost a minute, announcing a movie that could be really boring or something special. In fact, this feature by Anna Rose Holmer is so special that words can’t do it justice, and for good reason. Movement is its subject. Eager kids with fantastic moves and the urge to dance make up its cast. All ups with no downs, it’s a motion picture in the truest sense of the term. I’ve never seen anything quite like it and I loved every one of its 72 minutes.

And TIME’s Stephanie Zacharek:

Sometimes it takes a small film to tackle big but subtle ideas, like the role of the mystical in everyday life. In Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits, Cincinnati preteen Toni (played by Royalty Hightower, a newcomer whose face holds the camera with unguarded intensity) seems headed to becoming a boxer, like her older brother. But she really longs to be part of a dance troupe that rehearses at the same community center where she trains. After her workouts, she peers wistfully through the narrow window of the gym where young women perfect their elaborate routines. They’re older than she is, which is part of the draw–the world of feminine power and beauty that they represent calls out to her.

But shortly after she joins the troupe, the women begin suffering intense, enigmatic fainting spells, or fits. Are these an affliction, or possibly an initiation into a state of grace? Holmer doesn’t answer that question outright, and her film, both intimate and bracingly cinematic, is better for it. The Fits riffs on the power and mystery of adolescent beauty, and on the joy of what it means to move.