Deragh Campbell Soars As a Woman on the Edge in Kazik Radwanski’s Anne at 13,000 ft.

By Linda Barnard

Rating: A-

Even thinking about standing at the open door of a plane waiting to jump into the open sky makes my skin prickle with anxiety. But for twenty-something Anne (I Used To Be Darker’s Deragh Campbell, brilliant here) it’s a gateway to calm.

Toronto writer/director Kazik Radwanski’s low-key yet powerfully realized Anne at 13,000 ft. opens on Anne making her first jump. It’s part of the bachelorette festivities for Sarah (Dorothea Paas), her best friend and co-worker at a local daycare. Anne is elated with her experience, bubbling with happiness for her friend.

Whether childlike or childish, enthusiastic Anne seems a perfect fit for her daycare job. The kids adore her and the parents admire her skill. Perpetually giggling and riding waves of imagination, she often seems closer in age to her charges than her fellow teachers.

Things start to feel off about Anne, who vibrates at a level that’s just a touch too excessive, with excitement that feels it could cross into the uncontrollable.

The staff are patient with her eccentric, kid-friendly behaviour but soon become exasperated. Their complaints to higher ups about broken rules and inattentive behaviour baffle her. She feels she’s being picked on.

Campbell’s dynamic and physically expressive performance slowly reveals a vulnerable woman who either can’t hide her emotions or maybe just doesn’t want to. She doesn’t do well with adults or adulting. When people’s reactions signal she’s said or done something inappropriate, she insists it’s a misunderstood joke.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

Is it that Anne is immature and inexperienced? She can talk for hours about sharks with a six-year-old, but two salesclerks offering to help her in a boutique registers as torment.

Anne suffers when she realizes that she got it wrong. Being judged is her great fear and torment. We suspect this isn’t new.

Her mother Barb (Lawrene Denkers) tries to encourage and protect her, skittish about saying the wrong thing that will make her daughter close down, or bolt.

Anne’s drunken maid-of-honour speech at Sarah’s wedding swerves being a disaster. She makes an impression on wedding guest Matt (filmmaker and actor Matt Johnson of The Dirties). Initially intrigued, he soon finds reasons to put some distance between them.

Nikolay Michaylov’s up-close and occasionally claustrophobic, documentary-style camerawork pushes the realization that Anne’s giddiness is always flirting with a dark rebound. We sometimes feel we’re in it with her as the camera whips around Campbell’s face.

Radwanski goes for a slow reveal of Anne’s emotional struggles without judgement in a story that jumps around in time. It makes the sparse narrative unsettling, giving us a sense we’re either a beat behind Anne or in her head, reacting to the world as she sees it for this brief slice of her life.

As with previous dramas Tower and How Heavy This Hammer, Radwanski has made a character study of a socially awkward central figure. Anne’s first time skydiving at Sarah’s pre-wedding party may have been an emotional tipping point, a start to another cycle of spiraling up and crashing down.

It was a tandem jump, tethered to an instructor who would bring her safely to the ground. Anne becomes fixated on solo skydiving, eager to step out of the open door of the plane and bring herself down safely, a woman in control of her life as she stares 13,000 feet down to the ground.

It’s taken a while for Anne at 13,000 ft. to reach audiences since its premiere in the Platform competition at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, where it earned an honourable mention.

It’s also one of three films nominated for the $100,000 Toronto Film Critics Association Rogers Best Canadian Film Award (along with And the Birds Rained Down and White Lie). The winner will be announced at a virtual TFCA gala streaming on YouTube March 9 at 8 pm.

Anne at 13,000 ft. Written and directed by Kazik Radwanski. Starring Deragh Campbell, Matt Johnson, Lawrene Denkers and Dorothea Pass. Streaming digitally behinning February 19 at TIFF Bell Lightbox.