Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
I’m going to be perfectly honest with you. I never wanted to watch Wetlands. I had been following the buzz surrounding it at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, and while a lot of reviewers really liked the controversial German film, they all sent out the warning that it was the grossest, raunchiest, most disgusting film they’d ever seen. Apparently it made many core members of the press walk out in disgust. Sure, my interest was piqued on a really juvenile level, but as a mature and level-headed adult I figured I could skip it in favor of seeing something slightly more “high brow.”
Then, Team Decider had their weekly meeting and someone pointed out that Wetlands was on Netflix, and then someone else mentioned that someone on our staff should watch it, and it was decided that someone would be me.
You have to slog through Wetlands. I’m sorry, but that’s literally the only word that I can find to describe how it feels like to watch it. It’s a strange, striking, and intensely brave film that focuses on Helen (Carla Juri), a teenaged girl with a proclivity for being dirty. She likes her sex dirty, her life dirty, and her genitalia dirty. She winds up in the hospital after cutting a hemorrhoid blister while shaving, and she uses this hospital stay to seduce a cute male nurse and attempt to bring her divorced parents back together. It also gives her some free time to explore the demons of her past, and I guarantee your heart will break when you finally find out exactly why she resents her neat-freak mother.
Wetlands is unabashedly disgusting. There are scenes of male nudity and female nudity. The film features sex, drugs, and allusions to sperm-covered pizza. You’ll see poop, blood, and homemade tampons. Oh, and in one fantasy sequence, a woman eats a man’s ass — are you happy, Joel Kim Booster? What makes the film even more uncomfortable to watch is that it’s directed in such a way as to amplify how deliriously grotesque all these moments are. Camera angles and sound mixing are used to amplify the yuck factor. Wetlands is a film that will force you to look away and squirm uncomfortably, but it also consistently pulls you back in.
Juri plays Helen as a sweet little punk who doesn’t want the world to know how much she needs love. You get the sense that her depravity isn’t born of rebellion so much as it is a need to worship every part of life. Being a human being is gross. We like to think that we are civilized and clean, but we are walking cesspools of liquids, germs, and base desires. Helen gets this and adores it, and by extension, I started to adore Helen. I wanted her to find love and that’s why I couldn’t stop watching Wetlands.
You should watch Wetlands if you want to watch a film oozing in “ick factor,” but you should also watch it if you want to see a gorgeous independent film that revels in how scary, disgusting, and glorious it is to have a female body. [Watch Wetlands]
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[Photos: Everett Collection]
