‘Anne At 13,000 Ft’ Is An Unflinching & Raw Character Study In Close-Up [Review]

If you look up tips for first-time skydivers, much of it can be taken as sensible advice for how to live your life generally: dress appropriately, eat well and hydrate, show up on time. However, the rush of the jump — an adrenaline-pumping, world-spinning, free-fall at 120 mph — is like nothing you’ll get on the ground. The title says it all in Kazik Radwanski’s raw and tender character study, “Anne at 13,000 Ft.,” which tracks in often wrenching proximity the journey of a young woman chasing the ecstatic freedom of seeing the Earth from above to escape the walls of her life closing in down below.

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Anne (Deragh Campbell) gets her first taste of leaping out of a plane at her best friend Sarah’s (Dorothea Pass) bachelorette party. The occasion is one of a handful of moments of change happening for the 27-year-old: she moves into a ratty new apartment, tentatively navigates the online dating scene, and tries to adjust to the responsibilities at her job at a daycare center that Sarah lined up for her. These are the normal rites of passage for twenty-somethings, but, with the exception of the children in her care, there’s a palpable undercurrent of anxiety and tension that underscores almost every interaction Anne has with the world around her. In turn, those around Anne step gingerly into conversations, hinting at hidden landmines just beneath the surface, and unspoken misfortunes in the past. Her mother (Lawrene Denkers) instinctively and repeatedly offers Anne the option of staying with her, even after she’s just settled into her new place. Anne consistently declines, with a single goal in mind — to train and return to the skies, and this time leap out of the plane independently, without an instructor strapped to her in tandem. Whether she can achieve the same sense of independence and confidence when facing the aching dread of each day is a question with an answer as unpredictable as Anne is volatile.

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Carefully crafted by Radwanski, and led by an astonishingly sensitive performance by Campbell, the pair create a character in Anne that is vividly realized even if some of the details are just sketched in. Try as she might to keep it together, the thin veneer that Anne composes to get through each day is easily cracked, as she’s prone to bursting, seemingly without explanation, into tears. But more often than not, she attempts to restrain her increasing sense of being unmoored by over-compensating in what she perceives as normal behavior — pulling pranks, affecting a laissez-faire attitude at work, awkwardly managing a Tinder date. But what manifests is a self-destructive streak, one that pushes away those around her, including Sarah, her co-workers, and her new boyfriend Matt (Matt Johnson), and leaves Anne feeling more isolated than ever. Yet, as elusive and even unlikeable as Anne can be at times, Radwanski and Campbell never exploit her actions for easy dramatic fireworks. Theirs is a deeply sympathetic lens, creating a portrait of a troubled young woman whose difficulties are never beyond hope, even if individual situations feel hopeless.

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Working with cinematographer Nikolay Michalov, Radwanski composes a fiercely intimate atmosphere, keeping the camera almost in constant close-up on Anne’s face, even to the point of keeping others she may be speaking to out of frame. It creates a double effect of transmitting the character’s overwhelming sense of claustrophobia but allowing the audience to perceive every nuance and inflection Campbell brings to Anne. It’s something of a magic trick that, instead of the film making us feel paralyzed in keeping us so close to Anne, it opens up her world for both scrutiny and empathy (the lean, 75-minute runtime probably helps too).

“What is it like to be young and beautiful?” an elderly guest at Sarah’s wedding cheekily asks Anne. After taking a swig of champagne, Anne confidently answers, “Powerful.” The response is a revelation about how she’d like to feel one day — in control, certain, courageous. In our time with her, it seems hard to believe that she’ll ever get there, but the absolutely stunning closing shot of “Anne at 13,000 Ft” keeps the wide-open sky possibility she’s made the first step. [A]