Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Story in short. Celia Carmichael lives with her parents in a small village in Australia during the fifties. It starts sad as her grandmother dies with who she had a close bond (shown in a few flashbacks). She finds comfort with their new neighbours: a family with 3 kids and in a cute rabbit which she gets as birthday present. However several conflicts arise as her father doesn't want her to play with the neighbour's kids any more as their parents are communists. Because of a rabbit plague the police is also trying to confiscate the rabbits of all rabbit owners. Last but not least Celia and her friends are in a feud with some classmates lead by Stephanie Burke daughter of the local police officer.Why is Celia such an interesting character? Well the director(and actress) does a hell of a job showing how versatile Celia as lead actually is. She can be a pretty bad girl when things don't go her way even though she is not the girl to pull pranks on others. She only acts with a certain revenge when she feels they did her or her friends injustice. On the other hand she also shows a very caring side in her scenes with her pet rabbit, how she stands up for her neighbours. And not to forget like every child she has fears which are cleverly shaped by some creepy muddy monsters, gotten from a story the school teacher read to the kids before the holidays started. No those monsters are not the real horror elements they exist only in her dreams and imagination. But the more disappointments she endures the more real they seem to become for her.The real horror elements are shown in a few strong scenes which left quite some impression on me. I'm not going to give them away, without any gore or violence involved they struck me quite hard. It eventually leads to Celia doing a terrible thing and despite it was wrong I just couldn't condemn her. In the end only her best friend Heather was witness of Celia's crime even though I had the feeling her mother also found out.

This film made me uneasy. It's so real, so true to life, so light and so heavy, understated and over the top. It captures all the wild uneasiness and expression and off-center humanity of childhood, and makes it breathless and fully alive. It takes you all over the place. There's so many things going on, so many events and strange sights and sounds. The kids are swept along through some kind of strange journey, a backward and breathless running through life. This is not a horror film, or even a fantasy. It is a straightforward drama, that not only captures real life but delves deep into the sort of confused reality of imagination that children so often confuse with everything else.This film made me uncomfortable. At times, it's alive and pure and safe and quiet. At other times, it's brash and explosive and emotionally uneasy. In the end, it's dark and deeply disturbed. You don't see it coming, but in a way, the ending colors everything that's come before. It's the believability that makes it so strange, so hard.Rebecca Smart plays Celia. She shows a range of character that totally beyond expectation. She's confident, scared, awake, aware, confused. It takes a lot of time to understand all the complexities at work in her. Celia makes no sense, or maybe all too much. In the end, she becomes a more complete person. One who will live with things most of us could hardly even imagine.Geoffrey Simpson's cinematography is totally realist. There's no strange photography, no experimentation. It's filmed like a regular story, without exaggeration. And it's all the better for it. This film's writer/director Ann Turner (who's done little else of note), creates a strange and powerful story with her understanding of character. She pushes through all of her strangest, most uneasy ideas without ever making you feel like you're not seeing real lives. Chris Neal creates some strongly effective music. It is at once timeless and perfectly fitting. It sounds little like any movie music I'd previously heard, but quite exactly fitting to the images. Otherworldly without feeling out of place."Celia" is not an average film. It sees and expresses things in a way utterly like any other in the history of film. It has no peers in this sense, and that alone makes it one of the most powerful cinematic experiences I've ever had. But the nature in how it grafts darkness to light, fear to joy, is disconcerting. If you still remember childhood, you can find yourself in the scenes of "Celia". This is not sensationalism. This is one little girl's precarious existence.

In summer, 2003, I took a class about Australian cinema. We watched films like "Walkabout", "Gallipoli" and "Rabbit-Proof Fence"; it might have thrown a wrench in the works had we watched "Celia". At the video/DVD store, I found it under the horror section, but it's only a horror flick in the loosest terms. The movie deals with a nine-year-old girl (Rebecca Smart) in 1950s Australia whose amorality and alienation from society drive her to complete madness; I think that that was the plot. Certainly it's ugly what Celia does, but seeing what the adults around her are like, I felt that I had no choice except to root for Celia.The historical context involves the Cold War and the government's efforts to stop the rabbit infestation. As people tell Celia not to fraternize with children of communists, she grows more and more disenchanted with the world around her - after all, friends are supposed to be friends no matter what the parents' political activity. But when a cop takes away her pet rabbit, she really gets nasty (it also shows that the rabbit-proof fence that lent its name to the 2002 movie clearly didn't work in holding back the leporid plague).So how to interpret this movie? It looks at face value like one of the many instances of a seemingly cute girl having a not so cute side (think "The Bad Seed"). One might say that the rabbits play a role similar to the ones in "Night of the Lepus" and "Donnie Darko", even though Celia's rabbit doesn't do anything. I guess that it's worth seeing, if only once.

Firstly, this story is set in Victoria - not South Australia - as can be demonstrated from the name of the state Premier, Sir Henry Bolte. Next, the children aren't playing in a desert, but rather the local abandoned industrial sandpit. It is her dead grandmother who had been a communist rather than her parents who are opposed and working hard at cutting all ties - including burning gran's library and banning Celia from playing with the kids of their 'Commie' new neighbours.The rather bizarre choice of storybook read to the class by their teacher and which has Celia enthralled by its demonic 'hobbyars' is "A Sweet Obscurity" by Patrick Gale. Ultimately, her confusion between her terrified obsession with these monsters of the dark and the real world in which she must do battle with the "Powers That Be" trying to oppress, corrupt and destroy everything she loves - her memories of her communist grandmother, her friends next door, her pet rabbit, Murgatroyd - lead to her own mini-revolution and act of murder and the equally riveting scene where she terrorises the only witness (a weak-willed playmate) into lifelong silence.The story is in many respects so 'strange' as to seem based in reality - almost as if the author is making a confession about a crime in childish innocence committed as Celia. I don't know that I wanted the story to end in any way on a light-hearted note. The tragedy seemed likely to leave a lasting hole in several lives - unlikely to be reparable by a kiss or a hug.I recently found this movie as a throw-out sale item at the video store and it rekindled memories of when I'd first seen it on TV. Unfortunately, the name is not memorable - a flaw the producers should be warned of with any film the fans are likely to seek out. I had only vaguely remembered the 'hobbyars' as 'blue meanies' as in the Beatles film 'Yellow Submarine' - which wasn't much help for a search. It is not likely to be a widely available film even in Australia and if you have a copy, then you're lucky.