It is the challenge of every young person to find and define their own selves, apart from expectations from society, family, friends, & personal history. This is, unfortunately, exponentially more true for women of all ages, but particularly young women, with everyone having opinions about their bodies, their style, even their mood (you’d be prettier if you smiled more). Birds Of Neptune, director Stephen Richter’s English-language debut after the Portuguese Center Of Gravity, investigates this battle for self-identification, by following two eccentric young sisters, Rachel and Mona, chilling portrayed by Britt Harris and Molly Elizabeth Parker.

Mona and Rachel’s house is like a living mausoleum, frozen in time, with the sisters trying to cope with their parents’ recent death by car accident. They deal, each in their own way. Mona’s restrained by day, but loses all restraint as a burlesque dancer by night. She takes refuge in performance, in drama & fiction, with its clear delineation of emotions, which are dangerously messy and uncertain in real life.

Rachel, however, appears timid at first sight, but she’s secretly a rock star! An experimental musician, Rachel’s universe is in the basement, surrounded by singing machines, guitars singing paeans to the endless strata of the universe. Rachel is deep and powerfully emotional, but speaks in slight gesture instead of broad strokes.

Mona brings an outsider into the mix with Zach, played by Kurt Conroyd, a wormy psychology graduate student, who begins manipulating the situation right from the start, digging into the sisters’ mysterious past. Rachel reciprocates with her own friend, the quiet and kind Thor, played by the precocious Christian Blair.

Mona and Rachel lived at a mysterious religious commune for some years, during their youth. Zach finds footage of bizarre psychoanalytic exercises, with the sisters being forced to play different characters, different roles. There’s photos of a mysterious young boy in some photographs. There’s altars to faeries in the garden. Mona won’t let the house be cleaned.

There’s something going on here, levels and layers of mystery, perfectly captured in the atmospheric poetic Pacific Northwestern scenery, filmed in and around Portland, Or., and the gauzy, meditative, introverted soundtrack. Original music by Erik Blood and Kevin O’Conner, with additional sound design by Ryan Mauk, is one of Bird Of Neptune’s strongest points, cleverly vacillating between diegesic and non-diegesic, draws you in and out of the action. Sometimes you’re smack dab in the middle, sometimes watching the quiet desperation as through a rain-soaked lens.

Despite being subdued and understated, Birds Of Neptune is one of the most disturbing psychodramas I’ve seen this year – more horror than Horror. All of the secrets will be revealed, and people will show their true  colors, for better or for worse.

The performances are perhaps a little TOO good. Everyone played their characters to the nines, inhabiting their flesh and bringing these phantoms to life. Kurt Conroyd’s Zach is quite possibly the worst person ever to grace a screen (and this counts dictators and serial killers). His slimy subversiveness, his hamfisted attempts at psychoanalysis, his heavy-handed seductions. It chills my blood that any woman (or anybody) anywhere would ever fall for such machinations. Mona must have severe problems, to bring such a snake into the nest.

The quiet stasis will be disrupted, and nothing will ever be the same. How will Rachel fare? Will she follow her dreams, and emerge as herself? Will the Birds Of Neptune fly?

Gorgeous cinematography, a haunting soundtrack, and deep, compelling characters help to smooth out the moments of quiet indie melodrama. An essential arthouse flick, a moving portrait to the Portland landscape and its burgeoning film scene. One of the best films of the year!