The pure products of the US go briefly, unnervingly crazy in The Fits, a terrific rites-of-passage drama that charts an outbreak of mass hysteria inside a Cincinnati sports centre. Full credit to debut director Anna Rose Holmer for wringing the maximum mileage from a paltry $170,000 (£13,600) budget. Restricting herself to a single location and its immediate surrounds, she whips up a quiet storm of everyday horror; an allegory of adolescence, crawling with existential dread. The Fits is a small, spare picture; it blows in and off the screen in 71 minutes flat. But it shakes you to the core and the effects last for days.
When we first see Toni, the film’s pint-sized heroine (played by the wonderfully named Royalty Hightower), she is stalking the halls like some lonesome samurai, or rolling the big water bottles up the corridor to the gym. Ostensibly, Toni only attends the Lincoln Community Center in order to assist her brother Jermaine (Da’Sean Minor), an aspiring boxer. But her interest is snagged by the sight of the Lionesses, a star-spangled band of super-confident dancers who might have recently winged in from a neighbouring galaxy. Longing for inclusion, Toni signs up to dance alongside them. But membership of the Lionesses comes with cruel strings attached. These strings, it will later transpire, make the dancers jerk and twitch like marionettes.
Despite its short running time, The Fits refuses to be rushed. It strolls at length through the Lincoln’s echoing interiors, immersing us in a tightly ordered hierarchy where the princesses hold court beside the bathroom sinks and the boys scrap over pizza slices in the carton on the floor. But the tension builds and it finally breaks cover. Legs (Makyla Burnam), one of the older dancers, suffers a violent convulsion and is hospitalised overnight. When the glamorous Karisma (Inayah Rodgers) follows suit, her fellow dancers scurry to film the incident on their phones. And then, in the midst of a rehearsal, Maia (Lauren Gibson) suddenly arches her back and stares blindly at the ceiling. An outsider might conceivably mistake Maia’s agonised posture for some complex bit of choreography, but the Lionesses know better. Perhaps they know more than they can quite put into words.
It is this hint of complicity, I think, that makes The Fits so distinctive. Any first-time film-maker can produce a cheap, superficially effective horror film about imperilled girls inside a creepy old building. But it takes a peculiar skill to make one in which there is no obvious, easily identifiable threat; no axe-wielding psychopath inside the darkened gymnasium. And The Fits contains nothing, really, beyond its hothouse sorority of semi-willing victims: each eagerly practising their synchronised steps; each eagerly waiting to see which member drops next.
So what, exactly, is causing the fits? The Lincoln’s manager (conspicuously the film’s only white character) reckons the water supply is to blame. This seems a reasonable assumption, given that the club is sat in the midst of a corroded rust-belt terrain that is probably incubating all manner of environmental hazards. But then the tests come back clean, which leaves us none the wiser. Perched on the washing machine, drumming her heels, Toni’s friend Beezy (Alexis Neblett) says: “Maybe it’s some kind of boyfriend disease,” which sounds closer to the truth. Life goes on; the sports centre reopens. And with each passing day the seizure victims grow in number, gain in strength until – almost under the radar – they have established a new clique.
If The Fits finally shies away from confronting the monster in its midst, that’s surely for the best, because Holmer’s film is more about the observation than the diagnosis, more about the mystery than its resolution. Judged in terms of theme and content, then, this covers similar ground to Carrie or The Crucible, or Carol Morley’s The Falling. And yet its weightless, wild air put me more in mind of The Birds – specifically the scene in which the crows congregate on the climbing frame beside the school-house, waiting for the helpless kids to step outside.
Like Alfred Hitchcock before her, Holmer realises that a threat is most frightening when it wafts in at random, when it can’t be explained. And yet where the birds were regarded as emissaries of apocalypse, it could be argued that the convulsions serve a more positive purpose. Among the girls of the Lincoln Community Center, for instance, they are a violent symptom of change, a revolution in the system; a topic to be bonded over and gossiped about beside the sinks in the ladies’ washroom. If the fits don’t kill you, they make you stronger.
