Muscles
2010 · 14m · Australia
Directed by Edward Housden
Genres: coming-of-age, dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, tender
Bodybuilding-obsessed girl Millie, prone to tearing the heads off action figures and replacing them with Barbie heads, and her introverted younger brother.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The Barbie-head surgery on action figures is exactly the kind of visceral, unsettling detail that makes you lean forward—but the film doesn't fully commit to the weirdness; it keeps retreating into conventional sibling-drama territory when it should be leaning harder into the grotesque.
Housden demonstrates real control in the tonal modulation between tenderness and darkness, situating this within a lineage of British coming-of-age cinema that values restraint and observation, though the premise threatens to overshadow the quieter moments that ground the emotional work.
The masterstroke here is how the action-figure decapitations function as a visual language for Millie's interior turbulence without needing explanation—one recurring image choice that transforms what could've been a gimmick into genuine psychological portraiture.