The most gallingly overrated film of the year, Beasts of the Southern Wild is a comfortable middle-class fantasy of the moral purity of abject poverty.
— Chuck Bowen (Slant Magazine)
The film is not so much magic realism as a realistic depiction of a child’s imagination grappling with the beauties and mortal dangers of the natural world and with the humans who nurture it, or threaten its balance and their own lives in the bargain.
— Amy Taubin (Film Comment)
While the film centers on Hushpuppy’s struggle to survive the degradation that surrounds her — primarily through imagination and her incipient art — [a] “You’ve got to fight for your right to party” ethos is also a central theme. Viewers are asked to interpret a lack of work discipline, schooling, or steady institution building of any kind — the primary building blocks of any civilization — as the height of liberation. “Choice,” even the choice to live in squalor, is raised to the level of a categorical imperative. There is no inkling of the economic and social history of the region that had limited these “choices.” We are left with a libertarian sandbox, with a rights-based life philosophy gone rancid.[…]
The feeling of being disciplined and punished by cold and bureaucratic agents of social control seem to resonate with a good portion of moviegoers, not to mention voters. What social and psychological storms threaten us so much that even the technology of flood control can seem a “restrictive” interference with our freedom? Has the “State” truly become a self-perpetuating machine of repression, or are the burdens of modernity so inherently alienating that juvenile rebellion feels like liberty?
— Kelly Candaele (Los Angeles Review of Books)
An ostensibly progressive depiction of the marginalized whose parting political lesson is that government is a destroyer of communities, families, self-reliance, and freedom. (You won’t see a more poignant argument for why we should’ve left the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward alone.) A beautiful lie of a movie, Beasts of the Southern Wild is too studied to be authentic but too audacious to be dismissed. It’s a problem film, and not just because critical consensus will all but foreclose the kind of discussion films like this should instigate: on the ethics of representation, on the responsibilities of artists, on the rights to stories.
— Elbert Ventura (Reverse Shot)
Synopsis: Hushpuppy, an intrepid six-year-old girl, lives with her father, Wink, in 'the Bathtub', a southern Delta community at the edge of the world. Wink’s tough love prepares her for the unraveling of the universe—for a time when he’s no longer there to protect her. When Wink contracts a mysterious illness, nature flies out of whack—temperatures rise and the ice caps melt, unleashing an army of prehistoric creatures called aurochs. With the waters rising, the aurochs coming, and Wink’s health fading, Hushpuppy goes in search of her lost mother.