‘The Serpent’s Skin’ Review: Lo-Fi Trans Fantasy Proves Counterculture Reigns Supreme

There was a trailer this week for that new, expensive, corporate-mandated, young adult fantasy reboot TV series. You know, the one that enriches a shameless, virulent transphobe who brags about using her profits to obliterate civil rights for innocent people? And if that’s what mainstream popular culture is leaning into right now, then we have a thing called “counterculture” for a reason, and if that counterculture gives us fascinatingly odd films like Alice Maio Mackay’s “The Serpent’s Skin,” thank heavens for it.

“The Serpent’s Skin” is a low-budget, lo-fi indie film, sewn together from the most intimate remembrances of “Twilight,” “Spider-Man,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Carrie,” and the list goes on. (I’m not sure if it’s also referencing the evil tattoo episode of “The X-Files,” but I’d wager good money on it.) Mackay’s film borrows or, in the spirit of doing crimes, outright steals from mainstream popular culture, but it rejects everything that actually feels mainstream.

So you get all the inspirational, kitschy parts of your favorite nostalgic fare in a mature, sensitive motion picture with indie credibility. Sure, it’s cheap, but it wears its cheapness like a badge of honor. If this is the future of cinema, I say bring it on.

Alexandra McVicker stars as Anna, a young trans woman moving to the big city to live with her sister. She’s soft-spoken but undeniably cool, responding to Alice Cooper’s late-era boomerism with a quietly badass, “We’ll always have ‘Teenage Frankenstein.’” She is also, in the grand literary tradition of protagonist wallflowers, completely irresistible to other attractive people and quickly falls into bed with her hot neighbor, Danny (Jordan Dulieu), who’s in a band, and covered in tattoos. One of those tattoos just reads “F—k Trump,” so, you know, green flag. (“The Serpent’s Skin” isn’t shy about the language; that em dash is TheWrap’s.)

Anna finds a job at a small record store. When the store is robbed, Anna scans the crap out of the guy, making his brain scream and his eyes bleed. “Scanners” has a lock on the term “scanning,” however, so in “The Serpent’s Skin,” these psychic attacks are called “popping.” It’s something cool outsider queer people can just do. Never mind the specifics. In a speculative conversation right out of “The Matrix,” where it’s theorized that life is a video game and some people can hack it, that’s as good an explanation as any.

She meets another psychic outsider, a tattoo artist named Gen (Avalon Fast), and they embark on socially responsible pranks like burning TERF flyers with their minds and telekinetically yoinking cigarettes out of the mouths of pregnant women. And since Anna is, again, completely irresistible to every possible love interest, Gen falls for her almost immediately, and vice versa.

“The Serpent’s Skin” is only 83 minutes long, but that doesn’t mean it’s in a rush. It may have superhero schtick, but the plot is mostly an afterthought, with obvious set-ups like Anna’s father stealing artifacts from archaeological sites never going anywhere at all, as though—again, in the grand tradition of YA fiction—Mackay is saving those storylines for future installments. Mackay’s film is more interested in exploring how superpowers could enhance the sexual experience than in fighting actual crime, although it gets around to that eventually.

Unfortunately, that’s where “The Serpent’s Skin” starts to flail. Somehow a vampire demon possesses Danny—remember Danny? He was in the movie too—so he starts seducing and sucking the soul out of women in Anna’s neighborhood. He even sports a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” forehead appliance, just in case you hadn’t equated him to “Angel” yet.

Danny seems like a cool, sensitive guy until he gets an evil tattoo, but Mackay’s screenplay is quick to let him off the hook, ascribing his despicable hunger to somebody else’s subconscious. It’s a film about queer superheroes stopping a supervillain sexual predator, yet “The Serpent’s Skin” doesn’t delve into the underlying sexism of that premise very much. It looks, early on, as though Danny’s kabedon flirting technique might indicate a subconscious controlling quality, one that belies or at least complicates his otherwise wholesome vibes. But apparently not? Maybe? Did “The Serpent’s Skin” train us to search for pop culture references and deeper meaning so much that we started looking too hard?

It’s easy to get caught up in the haphazard plotting of “The Serpent’s Skin,” especially in the third act, because Mackay’s film invites comparisons to plot-heavy frames of reference across many artistic mediums. But this isn’t an action picture. It’s a hangout movie. It’s got a dreamy David Lynch protagonist wandering into an ultra-low-budget Full Moon feature and making it her own, imbuing familiar genre tropes with honesty, sensitivity, and a complete lack of interest in mass-market appeal. This is, as the opening credits proudly declare, “A Transgender Film by Alice Maio Mackay,” not some mainstream fantasy/horror/romance. And it’s a breath of fresh air.

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