Hellbender (Movie Review)

Screened as a part of the 2021 Nightstream film festival.

Izzy (Zelda Adams) is a teenage girl who lives deep in the forest with her mother (Toby Poser). They have a pleasant, if solitary, life where they hang out together, forage the woods for their vegan meals and medicines, and sometimes put on light corpse paint to practice and write songs for their bass-and-drums mother-and-daughter dark pop band which has no intention of ever playing for an audience. Izzy has a rare disease that means she can never come into contact with other people, but everything changes when this rebellious and lonesome freedom-seeking teenager meets another girl hanging out at the pool of a fancy forest vacation home. At last she has the opportunity to make her first friend, but this encounter sets her on the path to unleash a familial secret that her mom has been trying to keep for her entire life.

So what is a hellbender? It’s the name of the band Izzy and her mother play in. It’s a legend about people who “turned their backs on heaven and bent toward hell.” It’s “a combination of witch, demon, and apex predator.” And, of course, it’s a movie made by a collective who delightfully call themselves the “Adams Family” because, well, that’s literally what they are. Real life mother Toby Poser, father John Adams, and daughters Zelda and Lulu Adams are responsible for virtually every bit of production that went into this movie. Toby, John, and Zelda share the credit as co-writers and co-directors and fill in almost every other non-acting credit from editing to costume design to camera/drone operator. This might sound like a vanity project or some kind of weird outsider art, but it’s not. It’s a damn solid folk horror movie made on a tiny budget by some very smart and talented people in a heartwarmingly pure expression of punk rock DIY ethos.

Folk horror has been on the upswing lately between the success of Midsommar and the upcoming release of Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched and its accompanying box set "All the Haunts Be Ours," so Hellbender (which is scheduled to debut on Shudder early in 2022) seems like a perfectly timed movie. It’s a fresh take on movie witchcraft that combines crunchy Wiccan spells with its own unique dark mythology. Izzy and her mom are both extremely charismatic and easy to root for, even as their own personal desires and drives begin to diverge. On the strength of this one movie, I’m excited to seek out more of what the Adams Family has already done and follow them wherever they go in the future.