Kitty (15:04)
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Caution: spoilers.

So one day in 2017 I was scrolling down my newsfeed on facebook, and saw a link to a page on Criterion, about a 2016 short film that was directed by Chloë Sevigny, based on a short story by Paul Bowles. That page said a bit about the film, and had a YouTube video of Sevigny talking about the film herself. It also had a link to a page on FilmStruck, which included this film and one other. But apparently you need to subscribe to the site or whatever, in order to watch the films. So I was just going to put an entry for it on my "short films I want to watch" page. However, I discovered that the film can be viewed online elsewhere, so I watched it.

It's about a cute little girl named Katherine (Kitty, for short), who one day starts turning into a cute kitten. It happens in stages, I'm not quite sure how long it took for the transformation to be complete, probably not not more than a couple of days. Her mother (played by Ione Skye) doesn't take her seriously after the first stage of the transformation (when Kitty just got whiskers and her nose turned a bit catlike). For the first few stages, she still looks mostly like herself, but then one day when she's outside watching a bird, the transformation completes itself all at once. No one sees this, and of course they couldn't guess such a bizarre thing had happened, so Kitty's parents just think she's gone missing, and call the police. Meanwhile, their neighbor, Mrs. Tinsley (Lee Meriwether), takes in the kitten, having no idea that it's really Kitty. As the days go by, Kitty keeps returning to her home, but of course her parents still have no reason to suspect this little cat is actually their Kitty, so they don't let her in.

Well... there is eventually a semi-happy ending, but... it's still kind of... I dunno. I really don't know what to think about any of this. It's a well-made film in every respect, and I liked it. I just couldn't like it quite as much as I wanted to, because honestly I have no idea what any of it means. I'd say "Be careful what you wish for," except that I'm not sure Kitty ever actually wished to become a cat. Sure, she was curious about her name, and she drew cats a lot, and liked to say "meow." Maybe I'm being terribly obtuse, here, I mean, I can obviously see how all that could be interpreted as wishing to be a cat. But I can just as easily interpret it as simply liking cats. Lots of people draw cats and say "meow" without wishing to be a cat. Sigh. I suppose I'm overthinking it. It's a cute film. Maybe it doesn't need to mean anything.