Once upon a time, if you had asked me “who, in your opinion, are the best female directors currently working?” I would have rattled off a relatively short list (there are criminally few numbers of female directors) that would include Kathryn Bigelow, Sophie Coppola, Andrea Arnold, Claire Denis, Lynne Ramsay & c & c. Prior to my watching The Moth Diaries, Mary Harron would have been somewhere on that list. Alas, no more…
The story follows Rebecca (Sarah Bolger) who, after witnessing the suicide of her father many years ago, was enrolled at an elite boarding school for troubled girls. The story is set in motion with the arrival of a mysterious new student named Ernessa (Lily Cole) whose presence begins to threaten Rebecca’s friendship with the Lucy (Sarah Gadon). Very soon Lucy begins to act strangely and after bearing witness to a series of gruesome incidents Rebecca starts to suspect that Ernessa is a vampire. These suspicions, however, are treated as mere teenage jealousy. As the body-count gets higher and Rebecca begins to lose her friends, she decides that the only thing to do is get rid of Ernessa herself.
The premise is not what’s at fault here. The source material (Rachel Klein’s 2002 debut novel of the same name) is rife with teasingly cinematic ideas. The film even has the right look and the right feel, and amid the borderline awful supporting cast there is a perfectly fine lead performance from Sarah Bolger and a truly chilling turn from Lily Cole, who has been cast fantastically. The problems are with the adapted script and the mechanics of the thing.
From the beginning there is some embarrassingly bad dialogue – so bad it that it leads to unavoidably clunky delivery. One scene has Rebecca embracing the last of her remaining friends as she leaves the school, during which she states out loud “All of my friends are gone.” This totally unnecessary (and appallingyly delivered) line might have made sense if it was used as part of the film’s diary device;as it stands the line is a completely unnatural announcement of something that we, the audience, can see and deduce. Another
scene shows Rebecca having an after-class chat with her male English teacher (their romantic relationship is just ridiculously under-developed and shallow) during which they discuss Ernessa and Lucy’s relationship via a conversation about Dracula. The cliché of this moment doesn’t offend, what does is the fact that it’s handled with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
The script isn’t helped by the fact that most of the editing makes the whole thing feel like a jigsaw whereby someone has forced together a load of bits that don’t match. One of the few scenes that threatens to be genuinely affecting (in which some recreational drug use goes a bit awry) is ruined by a tacky and aesthetically ill-judged flashback. Then the silliness is turned up to 11 when a chair is thrown out of a window. The next scene starts with a voice over melodramatically stating “Ernessa should never have given us those crazy drugs…”
This illustrates the film’s main blunder, which is the extent to which it takes itself seriously. There is exactly one moment of humour: a classroom of bored girls studying Dracula comedically perk up when the English teacher mentions the words “female sexuality”. Perhaps if Harron had included a few more of these moments some of the film’s flaws would be forgivable.
Klein’s novel demonstrated that vampirism is a good way of expressing the traumas of being a teenage girl (for example, while Rebecca believes that Lucy is being drained of blood by Ernessa, everyone else can see that she is anorexic), but unfortunately The Moth Diaries is a failure on too many fronts for this to effectively shine through. I can only hope that the films flaws are due to studio tinkering and not Harron’s artistic choices.
