Review: Festival favorite ‘Topside’ eventually loses its most alluring aspects

In Logan George and Celine Held’s festival-favorite debut, “Topside,” we’re witness to a mercurial ecosystem deep beneath the frenzied floor of New York. Mom Nikki (performed by co-director Held) and her 5-year-old daughter Little (Zhaila Farmer) make their house inside the dilapidated structure of deserted subway tunnels and endure the fixed risk of being compelled out by metropolis officers.

Nikki, regardless of her personal points, is fiercely maternal and understands the dangers inherent to looking for out assist. From Nikki’s loathsome pimp attempting to take advantage of Little to involved shelter workers and metropolis staff who try and name on metropolis sources and helps, we’re reminded a number of occasions over the course of “Topside” that assist — whether or not well-intentioned or extra clearly underhanded — is to not be trusted.

George and Held’s movie makes good work of realizing the worlds that Little strikes by way of, each above and beneath, with an emphasis on the emotive and sensorial. Dialogue as a rule takes a again seat to extra experiential modes of creating a narrative world — it’s a alternative that speaks clearly to the urgency of Nikki and Little’s lives in addition to the mythologies they’ve crafted so as to endure it.

Whereas “Topside” is indubitably a movie that lives inside its personal immediacy, it additionally feels considerably entrenched inside the hopeless inevitability of its personal story. The frantic last acts sees our identification regulate from Little to Nikki and, in doing so, the film loses a lot of the magnetism that imbued its stark realism, turning as an alternative towards extra overly acquainted narrative actions. Ultimately, essentially the most alluring facet of “Topside” — its capability for embodied feeling — is maybe the one which was most reduce brief.