Loretta Todd’s MONKEY BEACH: SLO Film Fest 2021 Review; indigenous story and spirituality like you rarely see

Adam Beach has been Hollywood’s go-to American Indian male lead for so long that seeing him age into character roles feels both incongruous and liberating.

No longer does he have to be the serious guy burdened with a representational position by default.

In Loretta Todd’s Monkey Beach, as main character Lisa’s wacky uncle, he gets to teach kids profanities, make monster masks, and generally act like a rebel free from responsibility.

Beyond just the character, this feels like commentary on the actor’s career now too.

The film just screened at the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival.

Because Monkey Beach is an all-indigenous movie, actor Beach is like the special guest star this time around. Lisa, played as an adult by Grace Dove (three additional actors play her in flashbacks), is, in movie terms, the classic female protagonist who returns from the big city to her hometown to discover the true meaning of life. But her motivation’s a little different.

For one thing, a dead friend told her to. Not a friend who gave her advice and then died, mind you. A dead friend who periodically reappears and has casual conversations with her.

But this is no horror movie. Adapted from the award-winning first novel by Eden Robinson, Monkey Beach is a family drama full of literary devices that might arguably work better on the page, like flashbacks in multiple time periods, ghosts, and magical spirits.

Having to literalize such things on a non-studio budget must be challenging, and some effects feel just like effects.

However, this helps to anchor the story in the real world, where fancier CG creations might have thrust it into fantasy. It might be more accurate to call this a faith-based film, except that unlike in most movies thusly described, the faith in question is not Christian, but Haisla spirituality.

Which it does not assume the viewer will know the ins and outs of, so the details we need come in conversations between children and their grandmother.

It takes a while for that to all come into play. First Lisa must reconcile with her parents, and her brother Jimmy (Joel Oulette) whose budding swimming career was cut short by a nasty accident. Adam Beach’s Uncle Mick, like some other characters, appears mainly in flashback, which gives us some inkling of what’s coming for him and anyone else not in the present timeline. Lisa tries to reject the occasional visions of the dead, and one particular “red headed bastard,” a mostly miniature, portly spirit who dances on her nightstand. But they’re trying to tell her something – a premonition of death underwater. And in a fishing town, that leaves a lot of possibilities.

Only in the third act do things start getting seriously mystical, with characters traversing time and the afterlife. While the story slowly builds there, it nonetheless feels like a big, bold swerve into genre from a relatively realistic setting. Though again, perhaps no more so than a Christian movie with climactic visions of Heaven.

Director Loretta Todd, who has mostly previously made documentaries and educational TV, takes full advantage of the beautiful British Columbia coast and woods as a backdrop. It’s no stretch to imagine magic at work, hidden in those trees. In conveying a First Nations community from their point of view, she hits on many of the points outsiders might expect: great spirits, debates over radicalism versus fitting in, domestic abuse and alcohol issues, and more. But rather than make any one of those things the dominant trait, as a non-Native director might, Todd shows it as all part of a larger picture; a fully realized community with deep spiritual traditions that some people take to much more than others.

As with certain big studio movies like Black Panther, the benefits are twofold. For a Native audience, there are finally characters to identify with onscreen who are like them. For others, it’s a welcome departure from movies that only want to reflect ourselves back, granting us access into a world we know shamefully little about beyond broad strokes.

Loretta Todd’s MONKEY BEACH: SLO Film Fest 2021 Review; indigenous story and spirituality like you rarely see