As fun as the entire cast and script are, the real cinema magic here are the visuals. The maze comes to life through a combination of live action puppetry, forced perspective, optical illusions, stop motion animation, and even a zoetrope.
These twists reveal the many ways a vulnerable child, her desires to be special and a natural tendency toward rebellion can all be cultivated by a victimizer – that is expected in this kind of case – but it doesn’t stop there. Berchtold uses elements of psychology, sexual advances and even sci-fi to exploit similar needs in the very people that could have protected her, and that is what is most chilling in the documentary.
I’d compare the film to Mike Judge’s work, and I mean this as a gigantic complement. No single gag is necessarily fall out of your seat funny, instead they cumulatively charm you until you can’t seem to do anything except laugh at every interaction. She does this by not overly exaggerating any given moment in an unrealistic joke, but rather taking hundreds of totally believable ridiculous incidents and cramming them all together into one escalating funny movie-long joke.
