(REVIEW) “Wildcat” is a gorgeous and truthful portrayal of the inner world of a thoughtful Christian creative person — and shows the untapped potential of the film medium to express the complex and beautiful world of believers.

The film follows the life and fiction of the famous southern Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor (played by Maya Hawke), who wishes to be a great novelist but struggles against her growing terminal illness and rejection by her readers — both professional and personal.

Actor Ethan Hawke, who directed the film which stars his daughter as the famous author, fell in love with the famous writer when Maya used her poems as an audition for Julliard. 

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“It was easy to fall in love with this achingly earnest young artist,” Ethan Hawke explained. 

However, making it into a movie had to wait until after Maya Hawke broke out in her “Stranger Things” role.  

“A few years after the success of ‘Stranger Things,’ Maya approached me with the idea of making a film about O’Connor, and my heart soared,” he said. “Immediately, I saw O’Connor’s spiritual journey as a perfect opportunity to create a film about the intersection of faith, imagination, and creativity.” 

One of the highlights of “Wildcat” is its astonishingly accurate depictions of the inner life of a faith-based creative intellectual. The film vividly puts us in O’Connor’s head as she fantasizes about her stories and struggles to put her unique thoughts and feelings about the world onto the page, with brilliant flourishes that capture parts of the writer’s experience better than I’ve ever seen in a film. Visualizing the imagination of a writer is nothing new, with “The Man Who Invented Christmas” and last year’s “American Fiction” being obvious examples. But “Wildcat” sets itself apart with artistry and seriousness with which it takes this imagery. 

The movie will quickly cut between her fantasy and reality, such as when she imagines a gunshot scene and she reacts in the real world as if she’s been shot (a scene that’s in the trailer). Other times, she will have a difficult conversation with someone, or see someone she finds striking, and immediately imagines a scenario in her head riffing off of that experience with the same actors playing roles in her fantasies. All of this is paralleled with her own internal monologues throughout her real life as she cries out to God for answers – all reflecting the writings and experiences of the faith-based creative inner life better than I’ve probably ever seen before. Likewise, the religious worlds and imagery she immerses herself in her real life show up overwhelmingly in what she imagines.

The Christian creative experience is a unique one, and therefore, it’s understandable that most people have difficulty capturing it on film. There are plenty of tortured female creatives in movies these days, but showing how that experience dialogues with a fervent religious faith is missing.  

Most Christians that describe their inner worlds — from C.S. Lewis to Madeleine L’Engle to people I know personally (including myself) — recall an emotional and intellectual yearning for the transcendent (Lewis called it “joy”) which they both associate with their longing for God and with creativity. This has the potential for an integrated ecstasy few can match since the human need for God and the need for creativity are combined. Yet, it also means that when the mundanity and tragedy of life sever them from their emotional life, it makes them doubt God as well. This dance of the smart aesthetic believer’s psyche is done so flawlessly in this film that it’s almost uncanny.

The film also captures the tension in the worlds that Christian creatives inhabit and allows Flannery to defend herself, and by extension those like her, as she did in real life. O’Conner has to defend her dark and unhappy stories to her southern Christian ladies (something every Christian filmmaker has had to do who wanted to tell a story that wasn’t totally family friendly), while defending her faith and her novel’s use of the n-word (which she argues shows what the American South she comes from is really like) to her sophisticated city friends. I have experienced and watched many of my colleagues and friends go through similar double-alienation in the multiple communities we inhabit.  

The fact that O’Connor apparently wrote some racist things in her letters, but seemed to change as she got older and was very anti-racist in her writing, was something that both Ethan Hawke and Maya Hawke have talked openly about wanting to embrace in this film. 

In a recent interview, Ethan Hawke said: “Today, we are expected to acknowledge — and condemn — our own implicit racism. I don’t know if O’Connor always condemned it, but she certainly acknowledged it in herself and painted a harsh picture of its ugliness.” 

Maya Hawke, meanwhile, told The Hollywood Reporter: “Flannery O’Connor wrote about what she knew, and what she knew about was white hypocrisy. … What she knew how to look at was, ‘Oh, I don’t know how to fix this, but I see that there’s something deeply sick about this space that I grew up in and exist in.’” 

That said, if you didn’t know that O’Connor wrote some racist things, you would not get that impression from the movie. The movie portrays O’Connor as purely (if mostly quietly) critical of the racist attitudes of her contemporaries, even as she was committed to portraying the reality of the world she grew up in honestly. I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing, but it is interesting that it’s not entirely reflective of what Ethan Hawke said he wanted to do in the movie.

The film’s cinematography is a rare treat in an industry that often forgets how much power there is in the camera to tell your story as well. Ethan Hawke takes great care to frame so many of the shots in the film like paintings, adding to the feeling that O’Conner imagines the world in an aesthetic way. The filmmakers know when to keep the frame focused on O’Connor’s face — therefore focusing us on her feelings and her sense of isolation from others — and when to pull back and absorb us in the world that she’s taking in. 

The performances are effortlessly excellent. Maya Hawke plays the layers of Flannery O’Conner’s character, from her intelligence, critical nature and vulnerability, to her faith, with an ease and coherence that makes you forget how hard those things are to do. Laura Linney likewise balances believably annoying Flannery as her clueless mom and being her most loving support. Philip Ettinger is simultaneously easy to root for as a love interest and easy to believe as a doomed one. Liam Neeson’s cameo is perfection itself.

Films like this are a big reason I advocated this year to expand the term “faith-based film” to include “any film which affirms religious faith as one of its primary features” rather than just ones made by the faith-based film industry. A primary cause for the faith-based film industry existing in the first place is that religious believers want to have their experiences of the world depicted on screen.

And yet, while a movie like “Wildcat” is not made by the faith-based film industry, it does a far better job of articulating certain things in the life of the faithful than I’ve seen in most films from the industry. 

“Wildcat” is the perfect film for any Christian who loves or is involved in the arts and wishes to see their experiences deftly portrayed in the unique language of film. This movie gives hope that the actual inner lives and beliefs of believers can live up to their potential within this beautiful medium and provide at least one model of how to do so.

Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.