High school is challenging, competitive, and traumatic enough as it is. But in “Backspot,” the new feature-length directorial effort and cheerleading drama from filmmaker D.W. Waterson (web series “That’s My DJ”), the melodramas and complications of adolescence for young girls and the sometimes-unforgiving cliques they travel among, are nothing compared to the rigors and stresses of what young girls endure in the aggressively driven world of cheerleading.
In this new, hyper-stylized drama, “Reservations Dogs” breakout star Devery Jacobs further proves she’s here to stay and should have a long and viable career outside that excellent (and sadly now-concluded) series. Jacobs stars are Riley, a young perfectionist and ambitious competitor enjoying life on a mid-level cheerleading squad with her girlfriend Amanda (Kudakwashe Rutendo) and bestie Rachel (Noa DiBerto). But when all three are given the chance to compete, cheer, and level up with an all-star troop, the Thunderhawks, life suddenly turns alarmingly strenuous.
READ MORE: Toronto International Film Festival 2023: 26 Must-See Films To Watch At TIFF
In cheerleading, a backspotter acts as a support to the flyer during cheerleading stunts, but Riley seemingly wants to be more, at the very least, a shining star member of her team. Yet, what was once reasonably competitive in this new arena suddenly becomes ferociously grueling and ruthlessly demanding in its punishing drive for excellence. Riley is driven and determined, but once invited to join this elite squad, she struggles to handle the pressure handed down by her challenging and unrelenting coach (Evan Rachel Wood).
With a stakes-are-high competition looming, Riley seemingly ready to crack at a moment’s notice, she somehow must navigate her incapacitating anxiety, her splintering relationship with her girlfriend, and her desperate need for approval from her severe new coach.
But unfortunately, exhausting is really the only note that “Backspot” has in its arsenal, not only from an emotional and psychological perspective but even from a cinematic lens too. Toronto filmmaker D.W. Waterson is also a DJ, and unfortunately, this element of overcharged energy and kineticism that one sees and experiences on the dancefloor pervades and overwhelms many of the sequences unremittingly. It’s unclear if Waterson cannot trust the performances to stand on their own. Still, the filmmaker simply cannot resist the urge to craft over-cranked scenes like they’re from a frenetic MTV music video from the ’90s at every opportunity. Training scenes blare at you with loud locomotive montages and extraneous cuts. Worse, hyper-charged block-rocking-BPM beats often feel fatiguing and dated (guys, EDM is cool, but music and visuals that feel like they were created for The Prodigy or Orbital?).
While the dynamism of the choreography, stunts, and tumbling is perhaps exciting at first, it soon grows really old and tiresome. Likewise, emotionally, everyone seems to be playing one overcooked note, and in the case of Evan Rachel Wood, her cold, haughty, arrogant one-dimension almost qualifies as a sociopath. Going through her own trauma in a divorce, the character essentially plays a merciless villain, pushing the girls to dangerous extremes while somehow also trying to inspire.
Jacobs fares better, but she’s given limited material of being overwhelmed—which is always expressed visually in some overexcited, visually hectic manner. Frustratingly, Riley’s one visual cue of her growing paralysis and nervousness is scratching away at her eyebrows until they’re gone. At the beginning of the movie, it seems like a subtle nice touch; Riley’s eyebrows are noticeably frayed and thinning on the outside. We’re an intelligent audience, and we’ll soon make that correlation. But again, Waterson either has no audience faith or a penchant for being overwrought and obvious because this device—Riley scrabbling away at her eyebrows in a stylized close-up—is relentlessly used repeatedly (we get it! Think the excessively keyed-up drug sequences in “Requiem For a Dream”).
Written by Joanne Sarazen and produced by Elliot Page’s Page Boy Productions, Night is Y and Prospero Pictures, the drama is queer-friendly and sympathetic with good intentions for queer representation, which is nice to see and progressive, but that doesn’t salve the more unfortunate elements of the fidgety movie.
While the movie is capable of demonstrating the gritty reality of the lengths girls will go to in this surprisingly aggressive field, and once supposes the visual vigor of cheerleading exertion, “Backspot” otherwise conveys no sense of complexity, nuance, intricacy, or even emotional reason.
Head-scratchingly, “Backspot” ends in a surprising manner. For 80 minutes, the drama is basically ceaselessly communicating to the viewer that Riley is abusing herself. None of this is truly worth it—girls are seriously injured, her girlfriend eventually won’t tolerate the risks—and all signs point to a cautionary tale of athleticism. If you push this hard, eventually, something has to break. And we’ve seen that tragic narrative arc before, but at least it would track and make sense here.
Instead, in a very strange about-face, the movie seems to pivot to the idea of finding your voice, working hard to create your own space, and then shifts to Riley as a winner who defeated the odds to endure and make it, freeze frame cut to everyone celebrating and cheering, and happy ending, we did it. It’s unfortunately not an amazing film to begin within outside of its convincing cast— Thomas Antony Olajide is also good, and it’s likely that we won’t see the last of him, DiBerto, and Rutendo. But that wtf conclusion is where it veers into confused After School Special territory, and no impressively dynamic twirl into the air or camera move will change that. [C]
Follow along for all our coverage of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival.