The Lost Girls (not rated)
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I honestly don't know how I feel about this film. I kind of want to rate it "meh", but I feel like that's not fair. Still, I couldn't exactly say that I liked it. It's all just weird, and not in a good way. The lead actress, Livia De Paolis, also wrote the screenplay (based on someone else's book, which I haven't read) and directed the film. I'm not sure how I feel about the writing or direction, but at least they're better than her acting. Although I kind of wonder if that's at least partly because it sounds like English is not her first language, and that makes no sense for the character she's playing. It's also hard to tell if this is supposed to be more of a fantasy movie or a drama about mental health issues. Like, Peter Pan plays an important role, but it's unclear to me if he's real or just a shared delusion that's passed down through the generations of the family in the movie.

Anyway, there's a little girl named Wendy, whose father has been raising her alone ever since her mother, Jane, disappeared. Wendy is named after her grandmother (Vanessa Redgrave), who tells her about Peter Pan (who I assume is not a known fictional character in the movie's reality). She says he'll come to visit Wendy when she's 12 or 13, and she'll fall in love with him, and stuff. And years later, when she is 13, she does meet Peter, and he takes her to Neverland for a little while. The scenes there are sort of strange, and then she just wakes up in her bed. There is an indication that it all really happened, but I won't say what that was. Then she spends the next four years or so waiting for Peter to come back for her, and she's distraught that he never does.

We then meet Wendy as a young woman (De Paolis). She meets a man named Adam, and they start dating. Eventually she gets pregnant, and they get married. Wendy becomes a writer of fairy tales or whatever, and as her daughter, Berry, grows up, she shows no interest in her mother's writing. Years later, when Berry is a teenager, she seems to hate her mother, because of her stories about and obsession with Peter, which Berry doesn't believe in. But then one night, Peter comes for Berry... but she doesn't end up going to Neverland with him. I don't want to spoil what does happen. But eventually Wendy reconciles with Berry. And it seems like Wendy is beginning to come to terms with her own mental health problems. This includes Captain Hook occasionally appearing to her, throughout her life, and that's more complicated than her relationship with Peter. It's also weirder and more inexplicable. And she eventually meets her mother, Jane (Joely Richardson). Throughout the movie, too, we sometimes see odd scenes of Jane's relationship with Peter, when she was a teenager herself. Anyway, through all of this, I can't help but feel sympathy for Adam.

And I guess I don't know what else to say. The whole movie is just... weird, and confusing. I wanted to like it, but I guess I just didn't "get it".