Movie Review: 'Anne at 13,000 Feet' Starring Deragh Campbell

Anne at 13,000 Feet stars Deragh Campbell as Anne, a spirited and troubled young woman whose life appears forever altered after a skydiving trip for a friend's bachelorette party. During the jump Anne is serene and peaceful, back on the ground, returning to work, being around her family and starting a new relationship, Anne is volatile, unpredictable, and flighty. Anne enjoys making other adults uncomfortable for sport.

Anne at 13,000 Feet is a character study of a really fascinating character who ends up revealing a great deal about herself but also about those around her. At work, Anne loves the kids she watches over at a daycare. She’s eager to get down on the floor and play and encourage them. But with her co-workers, it’s a different story. Anne doesn’t take direction well, she feels persecuted by any sort of authority and is easily distracted with her own personal life.

Anne is also vaguely inappropriate with the kids. An early scene finds her splashing about in a fountain with one of the kids. She’s removed her shirt and when confronted by the boy's father she gives the boy her shirt, leaving her in only her bra and dress. This however, doesn’t stop the boy’s father from flirting with her later and hiring her as his son’s regular babysitter as a pretense for furthering a relationship with her, not one she’s interested in.

As for relationships, at her best friend’s wedding, Anne meets Matt, a friendly if overly aggressive young man who is eager to ply Anne with drinks. Matt comes off as a nice enough guy and we don’t sense that his attention is forced upon or unwanted by Anne but she’s also growing increasingly more drunk as the scene progresses. This series of scenes ends in vague fashion with Matt dragging a nearly unconscious Anne into his hotel room. It’s up to your imagination what happened from there.

If Anne found the encounter traumatic she certainly doesn’t let on. In fact, the direction of the relationship becomes decidedly Anne’s purview as she ramps up the relationship quickly. There is a scene in Anne at 13,000 Feet that is remarkable for the level of discomfort Anne creates. Having invited Matt to dinner with her family, he arrives with her and finds that no one knew he was coming. She proceeds to tell her family various lies about the seriousness of their relationship and the more Matt tries to roll with Anne’s abrupt shifts in energy, the more frustrating she becomes.

It’s a terrific scene and director Kazik Radwanski captures the moment brilliantly. Radwanski’s approach throughout Anne at 13,000 Feet is to focus entirely on Anne, to rarely take the camera away from closeups of her face. We are forced to intimately be in Anne’s space and it is a riveting approach. Deragh Campbell’s face is striking, her eyes are alive and you can see her wheels turning, the difficulty she has processing competing emotions and impulses and especially how she can’t seem to care about how anyone other than herself feels from one moment to the next.

Radwanski wants us to confront the dichotomy of an attractive young woman with many unattractive traits. It’s very revealing how Anne’s youth and beauty cause women to baby her or belittle her and how it causes men to ignore her troubled qualities and focus on what they want from her. Men want to sleep with Anne and women want to correct her behavior. Anne seems only to want to fall from an airplane and not have to think about what anyone wants from her or expects of her.

On the ground she’s provocative and unpredictable because she’s bored. In the air, she’s excited, alive and free. Anne at 13,000 Feet is similarly provocative and unpredictable throughout. It’s hard to say where the movie is going from one moment to the next. Director Kazik Radwani trains his camera on Anne and the film observes her every movement, every gesture, every hint of whatever it is that drives Anne to be so unpredictable, volatile and compelling. It’s a brilliant character study.

It’s hard not to try and diagnose Anne with some form of mental illness and undoubtedly, many who watch Anne at 13,000 Feet will diagnose her with something. The direction and style of Anne at 13,000 Feet however, also shines a light right back at you, challenging you to be like the other characters in the movie who are constantly seeking to solve Anne, correct her, control her, or use her for their purposes. Anne may be strange and off putting in many ways but are you any better for trying to decide who she is and how she fits into life?