Zebra Girl

Derek Ahonen's black comedy Catherine and Anita is adapted to the cinema but makes all the wrong moves.

Zebra Girl is a mess but not a boring one. Curiously misguided, it’s a work that leaves you wondering just what the filmmakers thought they were doing. The screenplay for Stephanie Zari’s film - it's her debut feature - was written by Derek Ahonen, the author of the play Catherine and Anita on which it is based, and the lead actress, Sarah Roy, is repeating her stage role. Even so, what is on screen must be a very different work for the simple reason that in the theatre, regardless of the play’s title, it was a monologue for Roy in the role of Catherine. To see her story play out explicitly with a full cast of characters and nothing left to the imagination must be quite different from hearing Catherine tell her tale in a theatre.

The story in question reveals how Catherine, a mentally disturbed woman, has come to murder her husband of three years, Dan (Tom Cullen). Following the crime, Catherine’s best friend, Anita (Jade Anouka) visits her. She claims to have been summoned although for her part Catherine denies this. In fact, even though Catherine is no longer the literal teller of the story, we do see everything through her eyes and that includes numerous flashbacks showing how she met and married Dan. We may well suspect that this angle renders the narrative akin to a tale told by an unreliable narrator. But what is absolutely clear is that as it unfolds this is a tale not only of a mental breakdown but also one that involves a history of sexual abuse.

To use such subject matter in the way that this film does seems highly questionable. Psychological thrillers usually take themselves seriously and, while that can be exploitative, what we have here is a tone that makes this issue even more prominent. I say that because, whatever it represented on stage, in its screen version Zebra Girl opts for a mixture of melodrama and black comedy, the humorous element not preventing it from coming close to the horror genre when it concerns itself gorily with the dismemberment of Dan’s body. It is above all that mixture of the macabre and the comic that makes the film seem an exploitation piece being too unreal to be taken seriously yet rooted in issues of much significance today such as mental health, sexuality and abuse in families. Using them to these ends does not seem justified at all.

Cullen, so good in Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (2011), has a thankless role as the husband whose attraction to Catherine strikes one as bizarre given the disturbing oddity of her comments at their very first meeting. Roy and Anouka fare better and Zari proves adroit for a first-time director in the handling of the flashbacks. Also on occasion she briefly suggests a familiarity with the films of Alfred Hitchcock. But it’s all no use. There’s nothing here to arouse belief and consequently no sense of pity. Instead, one can only feel that serious issues are being taken up in an unworthy way. Possibly the notion of bad taste is old-fashioned these days but, if it still counts, Zebra Girl illustrates it to the hilt.

MANSEL STIMPSON

Cast: Sarah Roy, Tom Cullen, Jade Anouka, Anna Wilson-Jones, Isabelle Connolly, Moyo Akandé, Romani Wright, Angela Yeoh, Henry Douthwaite, Daisy Mayer, Bucks Dhillon-Woolley.

Dir Stephanie Zari, Pro Dai Davison and Monika Kasprzak, Screenplay Derek Ahonen, based on his play Catherine and Anita and on a screen story by Derek Ahonen, Stephanie Zari and Sarah Roy, Ph Catherine Derry, Pro Des Frances Von Fleming, Ed Benjamin Gerstein, Music Caspar Leonard, Costumes Ros Marshall.

19th Street Productions-Bohemia Media.
79 mins. UK. 2021. Rel: 28 May 2021. Cert. 18.