Madeline's Madeline, Nightmare Cinema

Helena Howard makes an impressive debut in Madeline's Madeline

Josephine Decker's Madeline's Madeline is a provocative character study. Helena Howard plays the title role, a bipolar and biracial teen who finds her niche working with an avant-garde theater troupe. Its director, played by Molly Parker, becomes a mother figure to Madeline to the chagrin of her addled Mom, played by Miranda July. Ms. Decker's direction of her players is impressive. Ms. July and Ms. Parker, two performers prone to fussiness and tics, provide disciplined turns. The revelation is Ms. Howard who displays impressive range in her film debut.

Ms. Decker's script provides a multi-dimensional framework for her portrait of her protagonists, or rather, antagonists. Her exploration of the power struggle between the three leads enact a welcome engagement with her characters' virtues and flaws. Each woman displays vulnerability while searching for a meaningful existence, but also solipsism, narcissism and cruelty. Decker touches upon a host of issues: mental illness, the emotional suffocation of family relationships, the search for sexual solace and identity. Yet, Madeline's Madeline never feels overstuffed or pretentious.

Decker utilizes a hand held camera to convey not only immediacy, but also the subjective mental state of his troubled protagonist. Madeline's Madeline is one of the more accurate portrayals of mental illness because it has the feel of a fully rounded portrait and not a case study.

Nightmare Cinema is a better than average horror anthology. I sought this out because Joe Dante directed one of the segments, but his is only a middling effort. The standouts are Alejandro Brugues' "The Thing in the Woods" and David Slade's "This Way to Egress". Fans of Black Mirror should check it out.