The Moth Diaries (film)

The Moth Diaries is a 2011 gothic horror film written and directed by Mary Harron, based on the 2002 novel of the same name by Rachel Klein. The film stars Lily Cole, Sarah Gadon, Sarah Bolger, Judy Parfitt, and Scott Speedman. The plot follows Rebecca, a teenage girl who suspects that Ernessa, the new student at an all-girls boarding school is a vampire. An Irish-Canadian venture, the film was co-produced by Samson Films and Mediamax.

The Moth Diaries premiered at the 68th Venice International Film Festival on 6 September 2011, and was theatrically released in Canada on 6 April 2012 by Alliance Films and in Ireland on 24 May 2013 by Lionsgate. The film received generally negative reviews from critics.

Plot

At the Brangwyn School, an exclusive boarding school for girls, 16-year-old Rebecca Cantor writes her most intimate thoughts in a diary. Two years earlier, Rebecca’s father, a poet, took his own life by slitting his wrists. Her mother transferred Rebecca to the school, hoping to help her daughter escape the memory of her father’s death. With the help of her best friend and roommate, Lucy Blake, Rebecca soon recovers.

The following year, a mysterious dark-haired girl named Ernessa Bloch comes to Brangwyn. Lucy quickly becomes best friends with Ernessa and grows distant from Rebecca, who feels uneasy about Ernessa’s presence. She tries to confront Lucy about her involvement

with Ernessa, but Lucy dismisses her concerns as jealousy. The girls’ hallmate Charley is expelled for throwing a chair through a window after taking drugs provided by Ernessa at a party. Another friend, Dora, falls from the roof outside Ernessa’s room after she and Rebecca peek inside one night and see it empty except for a cloud of moths, and a teacher who was harsh on Ernessa is found murdered in the woods. Tension starts to grow at the school. Rebecca is suspicious of Ernessa, who she sees walk through a closed window and linger near the doors of a basement where the students are forbidden to go. She sees troubling similarities between Ernessa and Carmilla when reading the story for class.

Rebecca’s close friends all die, depart the school, or abandon her due to Ernessa’s influence, leaving her with nowhere to turn for support but Mr. Davies, a new English teacher who is a fan of her father’s poetry and shows a particular interest in her. The two share ideas on Romantic literature and poetry, and he tells Rebecca that vampires do not necessarily drink blood, but seek to drain the life from their victims. After confiding him one day, she and Mr. Davies kiss, but Rebecca pulls away. She hears a noise in Lucy’s room one night and looks in to find her naked in bed with Ernessa, crying out in either pleasure or pain.

Lucy is hospitalized after refusing food for weeks and weakening, and only Rebecca thinks Ernessa is to blame. Lucy refuses to listen to Rebecca’s suspicions and cruelly pushes her away, saying that she is not “the old Lucy” anymore, and that Rebecca’s refusal to see this is what has ruined their friendship. Although Lucy recovers briefly, Rebecca wakes one night to find her gone, and goes outside to see Lucy rising into the air with Ernessa before they both turn into a swarm of moths and disappear. Soon after, Lucy dies.

Ernessa confronts Rebecca in the library and presents her with a razor blade, elaborating on the pleasure of death and taunting her about her father’s suicide. Rebecca insists her memories of her father are happy, but Ernessa sings a disturbing nursery rhyme, The Juniper Tree, before slitting her own wrists, causing blood to rain down on her and Rebecca. When Rebecca opens her eyes, the blood and Ernessa have vanished.

Rebecca steals the keys to the basement, where she finds an old trunk with Ernessa’s name written on it, containing soil and a diary with entries dated 1907, in which Ernessa writes of coming to Brangwyn, then a hotel, after her own father’s suicide. Unable to cope with the grief, she took her own life by cutting her wrists in the bath. Rebecca realizes that Ernessa is trying to compel her to kill herself, and that she was Ernessa’s target all along.

Rebecca pours kerosene over the trunk, the diary, and Ernessa, who is now sleeping inside it, then sets them all on fire. Ernessa rises up screaming, but collapses back into the flames. Rebecca walks outside as fire trucks arrive, and sees the ghost of Ernessa, who turns and walks out of the building and into the sun before vanishing. Though she knows the authorities are suspicious of her, Rebecca is confident that Ernessa will not have left any remains. Now free of Ernessa’s influence, she takes the razor blade out of her diary and drops it out of the window.

Cast

Sarah Bolger as Rebecca Cantor

Lily Cole as Ernessa Bloch

Sarah Gadon as Lucy Blake

Judy Parfitt as Mrs. Rood

Melissa Farman as Dora

Laurence Hamelin as Sofia

Gia Sandhu as Kiki

Valerie Tian as Charley

Scott Speedman as Davies

Release

The film was shown Out of Competition at the 68th Venice International Film Festival.

Critical reception

The Moth Diaries received primarily negative reviews from critics. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a rating of 13%, based on 47 reviews with an average rating of 4.2/10. The website’s consensus reads, “Left in the dust of yesterday’s vampiric novelties, The Moth Diaries swarms in the wind, amidst lackluster thrills and a script with too many holes to count.” On Metacritic, it received a score of 38 out of 100, based on 13 critics, indicating “generally unfavorable reviews”. Neil Young of The Hollywood Reporter criticised the films lack of narrative suspense and overall inert storytelling, stating that “The Moth Diaries is about as scary and menacing as the harmless lepidoptera in the film’s title.”

On 4 May 2015, Scout Tafoya of RogerEbert.com included the film in his video series “The Unloved”, where he highlights films which received mixed to negative reviews yet he believes to have artistic value. He stated that “unlike other young-adult adaptations, the ritual and hardship of being in high school is never edged out by the supernatural goings-on; Rebecca and her friends worry about boys and grades as much as vampires … Harron was attempting to communicate honestly with teens and pre-teen girls, to make a movie with characters and situations they might recognize.” Tafoya further added, “Where the world refuses to stop turning just because crisis mounts for one girl, and thanks to a careless if not downright malicious marketing and distribution strategy, its audience never got a chance to watch it alongside Twilight sequels or Marvel movies … The film industry is only just learning it can’t get away with ignoring women of all ages.”

References

External links

IFC Films official site

The Moth Diaries at IMDb

The Moth Diaries at Box Office Mojo

The Moth Diaries at Rotten Tomatoes