In an it's not-what-you-think moment of Shane Ryan's ramble through madness, "My Name is A by Anonymous", a teenage girl sits alone on her bed. She's played by Russian pop-singer Teona Dolnikova whose dark, liquid eyes do enough silent work to convey her character's disturbed state. But for a second, those eyes are downcast, studying her arm as the other criss crosses over it, just out of our view. Something is in her hand. Given the morbid content that Ryan has fed us like some sinister mother bird up until that point, it's somewhat surprising to see that Dolnikova's teenager, simply dubbed "The Performer", is holding not a knife, but a paint brush, the wet bristles of which have left dark swirls and swoops on her forearm.
The taunt is effective. The non-literal expression of bloodshed seems important for a surreal film that derives its adrenaline from the very real murder of 9 year old Elizabeth Olten by her 15 year old neighbor, Alyssa Bustamante, in 2009. "A" is not a chronological account or reconstruction of the Missouri murder (Bustamante is now serving life in prison). But it extrapolates tidbits of the story. It also casts Katie Marsh as "Alyssa", a gruff teenager ominously amused by violence and vulgarity, and Kaliya Skye as "Elizabeth", a little girl with crystal-clear trustingness. Both Marsh and Skye resemble Bustamante and Olten, respectively. For those familiar with the true events, their characters constantly take you back to the non-fictional background of "A", right down to the specificities of how Bustamante killed Olten.
Despite such details of factual accuracy, "A" plays out like a spectral, unending game of musical chairs where roles, scenarios, and its restless teenage women are interchangeable. Ryan, both writer and director here, shackles us to the troubled minds of these seemingly disparate girls. We're bound to the unsettling yawns of their autumn afternoons. Often, we see them through the screens of their hand-held video phones as they record themselves ad-nauseum, and roam through empty parking lots and fields of abandoned train tracks, daring one another to touch the wires of electric fences, as if it would make their inner-demons giggle.
The girls include "The Performer" and Alyssa, as well as Alyssa's constant companion, "The Sidekick", played by Demi Baumann. (Baumann works nicely as a willowy doppelgänger of Marsh's. The red-hair of both actresses covers half of their pale faces for most of "A" so that they look like gloomy sisters.) Lastly, there's a skeletal Alex Damiano as "The Angst", an embittered girl suffering from bulimia.
With the many feelings at the ends of these girls' afflictions, Ryan gathers a terrifying bouquet of weeds that as a viewer, you're not really able to accept, let alone hold. Ryan is certainly ballsy. But his filmmaking's own friction between the real and illusory makes "A" nearly unwatchable. On the website "Mad Sin Cinema", the film is described as containing "brief actual acts" of the issues it explores. I'd wager a sequence involving a pocketknife and the arms of Baumann and Marsh, as well as a scene in which Damiano inhales Oreos and makes herself throw them up on coffee table seconds later, are among those acts. They're brief, but detrimental to "A's" nightmarish resonance. Next to staged scenes of rape and murder, their inclusion breeds the sense that "A" is just a little too real. The swatches of the non-literal are lost. Next time, Ryan should stow away the knives and pull his paintbrushes closer.
