“That’s my trouble. I’m such a fool. I go dreaming about the wrong things.” Tyler-Marie Evans opens her debut with a reference to Hedy Lamarr’s 1938 breakout feature, Algiers. It’s the perfect overture for Pretty Babies, a film that chases the same flicker of old-studio romance through the grittiest of modern circumstances. Beneath the teenage road-trip setup is a timeless tale of wanting more than what life has to offer, and the material is rewired through a distinctly female lens. It’s a jaggedly beautiful, often devastating portrayal of girlhood in all its forms.
Marie (Emily Alyn Lind) and Luna (Sadie Stanley) are best friends who spend their days dreaming of stardom. While Marie is straight-laced and lovelorn, Luna (short for Lunatic), is wild and reckless. They are drawn together by their shared infatuation with Golden Age heroines, having been raised on a steady diet of old Hollywood movies. The pair perform Bette Davis’ eerie showpiece ‘I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy’ from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? like their own private liturgy. But where Davis and Crawford famously despised each other, Marie and Luna are inseparable. Between the preppy uniforms, high school corridors and sinister realities of suburbia, echoes of The Virgin Suicides loom early on.
When Marie seeks comfort at Luna’s house after being rejected from drama school, she is raped by an unnamed assailant. It’s the first of several jarring pivots the film pulls off with more confidence than you’d expect from a debut. Evans shoots scenes of assault with a brutal honesty that never tips into voyeurism, refusing the kind of fetishising gaze this material usually draws. Slipping into a Thelma & Louise-style fugitive fantasy, Luna smashes a bottle over the stranger’s head, they steal his car and make for the lights of Tinseltown.
Pretty Babies is covered in glitter, sweat and lace, all Petra Collins-coded soft grain and sticky summer light. Neon smears of diners, motels and open roads blur until reality and fantasy become indistinguishable. It’s hard not to think of Mulholland Drive’s doomed dreamers as the girls chase a fantasy that curdles the deeper they go. Their journey sours fast when they take in two hitchhikers, strippers Sapphire (Ashley Benson) and Gemma (Madelaine Petsch), who offer a shortcut to fame. Luna talks Marie into sex work, the first of many hopes and horrors these girls stumble into along the way.
Evans frames sex work as neither empowerment nor tragedy, but something in between. She resists binaries of whore or virgin, victim or survivor, never letting the girls fall victim to their own dreams. That said, Sapphire and Gemma’s dynamic is quietly abusive without ever getting the screen time to really earn that weight. When it arrives, the ending is frustratingly ambiguous, perhaps intentionally so. But holding Pretty Babies to a neat moral misses the point entirely. Marie and Luna rewrite Davis and Crawford’s rivalry as sisterhood, refusing to allow Hollywood’s oldest story of women turning on each other to dictate their ending.
Pretty Babies is a startlingly powerful, female-centred portrait of identity and desire. It’s about friendship between girls and how it often costs as much as it gives, how it can hold two people up and also let them down. Evans emerges as a striking new filmmaker, whose debut lands as a love letter to the girls who dare to dream, despite it all.
