Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
In director Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits, a young misfit of a girl gravitates towards the intoxicating movement and power of a dance team, only to discover — just as she’s starting to fit in — that the girls on the team are beset by an unexplained rash of seizures and fainting spells. Even just in that one-sentence concept, it sounds like there are about three genres and sixty-something other movies crammed into this one vision. It’s a coming-of-age movie and a dance movie and a horrors-of-adolescence movie and an unsettling disease metaphor and, and, and … What ends up being so transfixing about The Fits is that it’s all of those things, but none of them long enough for the viewer to get complacent. Just as young Toni needs to be on her toes to keep up with her dance routines, there’s no rest for the audience either.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a movie that didn’t fall into the action genre that moves as much as The Fits does. And I don’t just mean that the characters on screen are moving/dancing (though they are, with some infectious energy); I mean that Holmer keeps the camera lively, alternating between static head-on shots and moments where the camera is roving all around. She comes from a camera-crew background, so this isn’t so surprising. Things get particularly mobile when the girls on the dance team start having fits.
While The Fits isn’t a medical drama about an unexplained disease, the wave of seizures that passes through this group of girls is frightening in an elemental way. It sounds weird, but I thought of the 1975 Peter Weir movie Picnic at Hanging Rock more than a few times, as that movie also dealt with a large group of girls and a dark, unknowable fate that befalls them. The Fits isn’t quite so horrific. This isn’t a harrowing movie as much as it is a curious one. This kind of unexplained communal ailment has its roots in real life. In 2011, the central New York town of Le Roy saw an outbreak of Tourette’s syndrome afflict a large number of girls in the community, seemingly without any pattern, connection, or explanation. After months of press coverage, speculation, and investigations into environmental causes (the real-life Erin Brockovich was called to investigate!), it was determined that conversion disorder was to blame. Essentially, anxiety made manifest in physical symptoms. Contagious emotional distress. A psychosomatic outbreak. Holmer has said that this was one of her inspirations for the film.
The Fits doesn’t concern itself with diagnoses. It just takes in this outbreak through Toni’s eyes. She’s a boxer who’s drawn to the dance crew, even though the members of said dance crew make fun of her muscled arms. She’s not on the inside, even when being on the inside means having these scary seizures. She dances with purpose and intent, but she’s not great at it. The big competition gets cancelled. In the guise of a dance movie, it’s a movie about alienation. It’s also a remarkably assured debut feature for Holmer, a filmmaker who we should all keep a close eye on; she’s got the goods.
