The ten year-old Angela (Miranda Stuart Rhyne) and her little sister Ellie (Charlotte Blythe) move to an old house in the countryside with her parents Mae (Anna Thomson) and Andrew (John Ventimiglia). Their mother has mental illness and has just left an institution and her husband tries to keep the dysfunctional family together. Angela is an imaginative disturbed girl that might have inherited the illness of her mother and is obsessed by purification to get rid of her sins; and has visions of the fallen angel Lucifer and the Virgin Mary. She leads her little sister in her paranoia and uses a circle of toys and dolls to protect them against evil. They have a crazy neighbor that Angela believes is an angel and she asks the woman how to find the way to heaven. When Mae returns to the institution, Angela becomes uncontrollable in her quest to heaven. "Angela" is a weird and bizarre film about mental illness and religious paranoia. Angela seems to have inherited the mental disorder of her mother, having vision of Lucifer and Virgin Mary, and fantasizing purification processes to cleanse the sins to reach heaven. The worst is that she drags her little sister in her fantasy. The tragic conclusion is expected. It is impressive the number of times that the microphone is visible. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): 'Angela: Nas Asas da Imaginação' ("Angela: In the Wings of the Imagination")

After a slow start this film was like throwing a pebble into still waters and watching the ripples widen. Written, produced and directed by Rebecca Miller with insight, sensitivity and humour there are strong overtones of the magical and the sinister, the angelic and the devilish and performances from the two child actors which are entrancing. The sisters, aged nine and six, create a world of fantasy which is partly induced by longing for a happy family life and partly by a desperate desire by the older girl to find salvation through spirituality. Their mother, a pale and ravaged shadow of her former self, with distinct similarities to Marilyn Monroe (who was married to Arthur Miller, Rebecca Miller's father) barely notices the girls as they drift in and out of her line of vision and her drunken haze. Their father is totally focused on her unpredictable behaviour and his job in a car scrap yard. There is a strong sexual frisson between the two. When the film starts we see the family move in an old pick- up truck to a rambling and abandoned house with metal beds and dirty curtains. Through a grill in the floor the girls watch their parents making love below, a scene of mystifying and disturbing violence. "It looks as if it hurts", the older sister says to her little sister when she tries to prepare her for when she has to kiss boys and "do it" in order to have a baby. The little sister is, as is the case with siblings, in awe of her big sister and hangs on her every word, believing the increasingly bizarre and black rituals that she is told she must perform in order to "Go into the Big Nothing". There are terrifying moments, funny moments and wonderful cameos - like the next door neighbour who sleep walks every night and looks for a letter in her mail box, always dressed in her nightie and with curlers in her hair. There is a wonderful scene of a baptism in the nearby lake and a night time visit to a fairground where a young man with dangerous intentions almost gets his way. I found it riveting, worrying, delightful, believable and a completely brilliant portrayal of the power of the imagination that children have, which is sadly so little encouraged.

A leisurely and ultimately tragic tale of two girls, ten-year-old Angela and her six-year-old sister Ellie, led astray by a dysfunctional life style and fantasies of religious salvation.Travail seems heaped upon travail. Father is distant and brusque. Mother is a bipolar who is hospitalized. The family is recently moved into a small town in upstate New York, and a pretty bleak one at that. Angela and Ellie are baptized in the local stream and run away from home. There is a weird, oneiristic episode in a carnival. A young man seems to befriend them but it's unclear whether his interest is paternal or more raw than that. (Angela is young and scrawny but rather appealing, with her long blond mane and sad face.) By this time Angela has begun to acquire religious delusions and believes the young man to be an friend from heaven -- or maybe a fiend from hell, I couldn't quite figure it out, since my own delusions don't run on a parallel track.The man gently kisses Angela's cheek. In the grip of her conviction, she tells him emphatically, "I know you. I know who you are." The man backs off, nonplussed, agitated, asks, "Who told you?", then runs to his car and drives quickly away. I don't know who he was, what his intentions were, or what he was afraid of, and you won't either.The whole movie is rather like that scene. The two girls wander through it and things happen to them. The significance of the events is only what we attribute to them. A placid white stallion wanders into the picture and Angela indicates the horse's member and explains to Ellie that that's what men have. Girls have to be married before they're twenty-one and do it with men, otherwise the girls begin to shrink. That's why you see so many little old ladies. (I'm not making this up.) Three features of the movie are memorable. One is the acting of the two kids. It's perfectly okay (except for an arguable second or two, here and there). How do they find children so young who can handle parts this well? Second is the location shooting and the everyone-else-is-dead atmosphere. The little town and the surrounding woods and fields aren't themselves ugly, but they're not pretty either. They're more indifferent than anything else. There's no enchantment in them, though there is the hint of a haunt. (A young boy runs into them in a grassy field, punches Angela in the eye, and scoots away.) In no scene is there ever more people than is absolutely necessary to establish even a minimal sense of verisimilitude. The streets of the town are dismal and empty of life. The carnival is practically deserted. The location LOOKS a bit like upstate New York but the atmosphere is misty and ridden with fundamentalist religion, suggesting Appalachia, a little farther South.Third -- look out, spoiler! -- third is Angela's death scene. It's flamboyantly understated. Angela believes that if one baptism is good for you, then an infinite number of them is infinitely better. So she dunks herself and dunks herself and gradually drifts downstream until the shallow creek turns into a wide rippling swiftly moving river and disappears without a sound.The budget is low. The story is despairing. I'm not sure what the point of the film is, outside of its capturing a number of strikingly composed shots. I guess it's tough to come from a broken family and it's tough to face adolescence. And, as the Buddha suggested, let's not take our actions to extremes, not even our attempts at salvation. Maybe, as Angela says, heaven is right here when you're alive, and hell is after you're dead.

Rebecca Miller's haunting tale of a young girl driven by her religious obsessions into a frightening world of hallucinogenic images and superstitious delusion. There are touching performances by the two principal girl actors, Miranda Stuart Rhyne and Charlotte Eve Blythe. Rhyne, in particular, is engaging as the young protagonist caught in a heavenly struggle between good and evil to save her mentally ill mother. She convincingly portrays Angela as a determined and feisty but naive and vulnerable child in equal measure; someone who is headstrong but literally open to abuse.There is a fine director's commentary on the DVD narrated by Miller exploring the themes and motivations that went into the making of the film.