Garden of unearthly delights

THE Twilight franchise ground to an inglorious conclusion last year, so why celebrate what appears to be an attempt to create a similar franchise?

Beautiful Creatures

THE Twilight franchise, after a reasonably promising start, ground inexorably to an inglorious conclusion last year, so why celebrate what appears to be an attempt to create a similar franchise?

Because, happily, Beautiful Creatures, despite the limitations inherent in its basic plot - romance between a supernatural creature and a mortal - is not only head and shoulders above the lowest common denominator approach of the Twilight films but heralds the arrival of an exciting new antipodean actress, Alice Englert, daughter of director Jane Campion.

This is the third feature Englert has made in the past year, but the first to reach Australia (her first, Ginger & Rosa, a British film by Sally Potter, has opened overseas but hasn't yet been seen in this country). In Beautiful Creatures, Englert brings a refreshing humour, depth and pathos to the character of Lena Duchannes, a 15-year-old who arrives in the small town of Gatlin, South Carolina, to live with her uncle, Macon Ravenwood (Jeremy Irons).

Before Lena's arrival in town, we've been presented with an introduction to life in Gatlin by Ethan Wate (Alden Ehrenreich), who is just starting his junior year of high school. Ethan is a fish out of water in Gatlin, a town boasting 12 churches and a library with a list of banned books. These include Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, which Ethan is reading, and as the camera pans around his bedroom we see other literary and cinematic influences include A Clockwork Orange and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. This is clearly a young man who craves the wider world especially, as he complains, as the nearest Starbucks is in far-off Charleston ("How sick is that?") and the local cinema plays movies only after they're out on DVD. Gatlin is no place for a bright young man to be growing up in without a mother, who died some time earlier, and with a father so reclusive we never see him. The only influence on Ethan seems to be Amma (Viola Davis), whose role in the household is ambiguous.

Ethan's girlfriend, Emily (Zoey Deutch), like most of the population of Gatlin, is extremely religious; she's already miffed that Ethan has been avoiding her through the summer and she takes out her frustration on Lena, the new girl who is "different".

Ethan, however, is smitten with Lena because she reads books even he hasn't discovered yet (by Charles Bukowski, for example). Before long they're so obviously attracted to one another that Emily's jealousy can't be hidden. "I pray you go straight to hell," she tells Ethan, who responds: "I'm going to stop in New York first."

So, despite the basic similarities with the Twilight films, Beautiful Creatures proves surprisingly literate and witty. It was written and directed by Richard LaGravenese, whose screenplay for The Fisher King was a model of its kind, and even as it attempts to skirt horror-romance cliches it manages to charm - I especially liked being informed that the "casters", as these witches prefer to be called, used to be based in Washington, DC, but were thrown out by Nancy Reagan, "the only mortal they were ever scared of".

I presume this is the first film in a new franchise and I just hope it continues to be as sprightly. There are already some signs of flatulence (at just more than two hours, the film is too long), but I hope the series never takes itself too seriously. The plot in the initial episode hinges on whether Lena will become a "dark" caster - like her scandalous cousin Ridley (Emmy Rossum) and like her mother, Sarafine, who spends much of the film occupying the body of the God-bothering Mrs Lincoln (Emma Thompson) - or a "light" (and thus mortal-friendly) one.

Handsomely photographed and designed, with some sparingly used but very striking visual effects, Beautiful Creatures may almost be good enough to attract movie-goers who don't like fantasy films. At the very least the young actors, and especially Englert, are worth checking out.

Beautiful Creatures (M)
3.5 stars
National release from Thursday