Massachusetts Premiere!

Queer cinema wunderkind Alice Maio Mackay makes her BUFF debut with her sixth feature in four years The Serpent’s Skin, a new transgender film that cements the 21-year old Aussie filmmaker as one of the most prolific B-movie auteurs of the decade. In her most formally accomplished and witchiest work yet, Maio Mackay pays tribute to the supernatural women of nineties basic cable with a sapphic love story suffused in the director’s signature low-budget, neon-soaked horror aesthetics and unapologetic queer pride.

Introverted trans girl Anna (Alexandra McVicker) leaves a troubled home life to move in with her older sister Dakota (Charlotte Chimes) in Adelaide, where she begins experiencing sexually-charged visions of tattoo artist Gen (Avalon Fast, whose own film, CAMP, screens Sunday, March 22 at 3:30PM) in the midst of hooking-up with resident emo-hottie Danny (Jordan Dulieu). While working her new record store job, Anna unleashes latent psychic abilities to “pop” the brain of a would-be-robber, drawing out fellow witch Gen and solidifying a bond that quickly turns romantic. As the two young women refine their powers against local TERFs and toxic men, they unknowingly manifest a demon that possesses Danny’s newest serpentine ink job. With Danny on the loose sucking the souls from their friends and family, it’s up to Anna and Gen to face their own demons and stop Danny’s rampage before it’s too late.

Reteaming with cinematographer Aaron Schuppan, co-writer Benjamin Pahl Robinson, and Carnage for Christmas editor Vera Drew (director of The People’s Joker), Maio Mackay continues to hone her filmmaking craft in The Serpent’s Skin, marking a new chapter in the director’s ever-expanding oeuvre with the help of producer Louise Weard (director of the Castration Movie anthology). Weaving hallucinatory montages of double-exposures with passionate love scenes between McVicker and Fast, the film visualizes the immersive nature of sapphic desire, where two become one in body and mind. Like an imagined episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Charmed deemed too gay for broadcast television, The Serpent’s Skin basks in the TV-glow of queer identification and nineties nostalgia. – Nicole Veneto

Brattle Passes Not Accepted