HORSE GIRL

Name: HORSE GIRL
Item: HORSE GIRL
Author: Tess Farrand

"Horsing Around with Reality"

Family Content: -3 Excessive sex, violence, immorality, and/or worldview problems. (Sometimes excessive content such as violence is in otherwise redemptive movies.)

Entertainment Quality:

	None	Light	Moderate	Heavy
Language
Violence
Sex
Nudity

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What You Need To Know:

HORSE GIRL is a psychological science fiction thriller that follows a young woman named Sarah. Sarah works at an arts and craft store, enjoys the horse park and participates in Zumba exercise classes. However, she doesn’t have many friends and spends her time at home making crafts and is obsessed with watching a science fiction series on TV. Her life starts to turn upside down when she begins experiencing weird visions about aliens and can’t tell reality and these visions apart. This sends her into a mental spiral.

HORSE GIRL is engaging and sometimes even enthralling. Alison Brie gives a good performance as Sarah. That said, the movie is too weird and confusing. HORSE GIRL also has a strong New Age, pagan worldview about alien infestation, cloning and mental disturbance. Eventually, the movie seems to validate the title character’s visions of aliens and beliefs about cloning. Finally, HORSE GIRL has lots of strong foul language, excessive nudity in one scene, a sex scene, and some substance abuse. So, HORSE GIRL contains too much offensive, immoral content conflicting with a biblical worldview.

Content:

(PaPa, FRFR, O, B, LLL, V, SS, NNN, AA, DD, M):

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:

Strong New Ager/pagan worldview about a troubled woman who believes she’s a clone, has visions about aliens kidnapping her, speaks about the aliens and refers to “god of technology, floats up toward the sky and is presumably carried by some kind of light beam, and burns sage in her house to try and cleanse it from the aliens, plus a woman in a store briefly talks about reading tarot cards and an Armenian cup and how colors have energy, and some light moral elements with main character really loving and caring for her horse and others around her

Foul Language:

22 obscenities (mostly “f” words), three light OMG profanities, vomiting in one scene, and woman spits into a test tube for DNA test

Violence:

Dead body and guns are shown on a TV show character is watching and a character has multiple nosebleeds

Sex:

Man and woman who aren’t dating make out, and protagonist is depicted fornicating with a man in a vision she’s having that feels like reality

Nudity:

Full frontal nudity of the main character, upper female nudity, woman seen in her underwear, women seen in sports bras three times while working out, woman is shown in the shower twice but could only see shoulders up, and upper male nudity shown once

Alcohol Use:

House party where there was drinking, and a man and woman are drunk, and wine is seen with dinner

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:

No smoking but drugs are discussed and rolling and smoking marijuana cigarettes are shown; and,

Miscellaneous Immorality:

Woman lies and uses fake name, woman stalks a man, boyfriend sleeps over at girlfriend’s house, and there’s a dysfunctional father and daughter relationship.

More Detail:

HORSE GIRL follows a young woman named Sarah. Sarah works at an arts and crafts store where she has a good relationship with her co-worker Joan. After work, she visits the horse stables where the horse she used to own lives. Sarah lives with a girl named Nikki. The two are total opposites, but they get along as roommates.

That night, Nikki’s boyfriend wakes to get a glass of water from the kitchen. He shines his phone flashlight and finds Sarah standing directly facing the wall making no sounds. When he says something, it looks like Sarah wakes from what seems to be sleep walking and returns to her room. Sarah experiences a weird vision in her sleep for the first time.

The following day at work, Joan gifts Sarah with a DNA test for her birthday. Later that evening, Sarah goes home to spend her birthday alone to watch a show called purgatory. The show deals with supernatural elements and is showing a man who thinks he has a clone. As Sarah watches, she completes the DNA test but is then interrupted by Nikki and her boyfriend arriving home.

Nikki decides to throw Sarah a little party and invites one of her boyfriend’s friends over. A young man named Darren arrives, and he and Sarah hit it off. Darren leaves later that night, and Sarah sleeps in the living room where she experiences more weird visions. The next day, Sarah goes to visit an old friend that had been in a tragic accident with a horse. Sarah had been with her when it happened and might have underlying issues from experiencing her friend’s accident.

That night, Sarah continues to experience the same visions in her sleep. Sarah then wakes up to find her car missing. When her father gets a call about the car, viewers learn that her mother and grandmother passed away, both of whom had what seems to be mental illnesses.

Things start to get even weirder for Sarah when she wakes up with bruises all over her body. Sarah visits the doctor for some nosebleeds she’s been experiences and mentions her bruises. When she tells them what they are from and how she thinks she has a clone, he tells her to visit a different doctor.

Sarah life starts to spiral downhill at this point, and she starts to have a mental breakdown. Sarah, and the audience, can’t tell the difference between reality and what she sees in her head. Sarah begins to talk about aliens and the god of technology and finds herself in some type of mental hospital because of an incident that happened at her work.

When Sarah finds out her roommate at the hospital is one of the girls in her vision, she freaks out. Sarah asks the girl why she’s there and begins to tell her about the vision. Sarah’s roommate gets very defensive and claims she has the same vision. Sarah is excited to know she’s not crazy and is somehow released from the hospital when it’s clear she’s not herself and healthy.

HORSE GIRL makes the audience laugh at some points. The audience feels empathy for Sarah at first, and then the plot gets weird. The storyline is interesting as it kind of touches on Sarah’s favorite show, and how it influences her. One of the most compelling parts of HORSE GIRL is how the filmmakers depict that some things in Sarah’s favorite TV show also happen in real life. This sends the message that entertainment and media can influence humans more than people think.

HORSE GIRL is engaging and sometimes even enthralling. Alison Brie gives a very good performance as Sarah. Her performance helps hold the viewer’s attention. That said, the movie is a too weird and confusing, although sometimes the weird parts are beguiling.

Also, the movie has a strong New Age, pagan worldview about alien infestation, cloning and mental disturbance. At one point, the title character talks about a “god of technology.” At another point, she floats up toward the sky and is presumably carried by some kind of light beam. Eventually, the movie seems to validate her visions of aliens and beliefs about cloning, but for a time, the movie has viewers wondering what’s real and what’s not. HORSE GIRL does have some moral elements. For example, the title character really loves and cares for her horse and other people. Sadly, though, HORSE GIRL also has lots of strong foul language, excessive nudity in one scene, a sex scene, and some drug use. Thus, HORSE GIRL contains too much offensive, immoral content.

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Quality:

- Content: -3