Supernatural fever dream The Serpent’s Skin is a deliriously queer ouroboros

Courtesy of Dark Star Pictures

What are our twenties for, if not making hedonistic messes of ourselves and others, having to clean them up, and making things worse in the process? 

With a torment nexus job market for recent graduates, the baffling popularity of an AI-generated fruit Love Island, and the horrors of the federal government of the United States of America, making or being your own mess can be more than tempting—regardless of the consequences. 

In timely fashion, then, trans Australian filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay delivers on that fantasy-reality with The Serpent’s Skin, a queer supernatural horror/romance with a freaky (in many senses) witches versus vampires premise.

Here, we follow Anna (Alexandra McVicker) as she’s freshly escaped from her small transphobic hometown and embodies the dream of countless twenty-somethings: a new city with a fresh start, a new job at the cool indie record shop, and new tatted up hot people who want her—all while chuffing cigarettes in the warm romantic glow of a Wong Kar Wai movie. 

From the start, things are looking up for Anna: she immediately scores a one-night stand with the apartment complex’s e-boy heartthrob Danny (Jordan Dulieu), an alt girl gang, and a lover named Gen (Avalon Fast) with whom Anna shares an immediate connection. They also share the same powerful secret threatening to tear everything apart. 

They’re both witches who are also empaths who also have mind control and, for Anna, the ability to kill people with her mind. Her eyes even glow a charming, low-budget VFX violet you can’t help but love as men scream in terror and pain before her.  

This world of power exists only between Anna and Gen, who’ve found each other after having visions and dreams of the other. In their first meeting, they get high and lez out immediately. I would say sorry to Danny, but he gets his lick back when Gen—in the process of tattooing him with an ouroboros—inadvertently unleashes a demonic possession in our troubled e-boy, with which our girls have to face their problems and fix.

If this all sounds like campy Mary Sue fanfic bliss, you’ve hit the mark. 

Largely speaking to this bliss is the movie’s technical vibrance. The score involves Bandcamp-y techno fun in the opening credits and clubbing scenes. Meanwhile, tracks meant to invoke distrustful suspense are very on the nose, but play self-awarely into the expectation that we’re watching a cheeky little genre movie. The editing also leans a bit far into repetitive music video territory, but it’s at least into evocatively delirious, indie-sleaze music video territory. Oh, and did I mention the Wong Kar Wai glow? 

As with many late-night fanfics, though, there is heart in the story, but the execution is clumsy. This becomes both the fun of the mess and the movie’s detriment. Fittingly, the ouroboros—that ancient image of a snake eating away at itself—is the film’s central symbol. 

McVicker’s delivery, amid the chaos of sex and acid-addled clubbing and Danny’s vampiric trauma spree, is comically nonchalant, but unconvincingly flat where we need her to go big. Fast, with her eyebrow piercing and talent with a tattoo gun, is the dream goth gf of any early Myspace user, but simultaneously an edgy, all-too predictable middle finger to Society—something like the “Fuk off prepz” moment from the infamous tale, My Immortal, if we want to stick to the fanfiction motif.

This isn’t to exclude Dulieu, either, whose performance seems to take itself the most seriously. Except, a close-up shot of the Australian’s “FUCK TRUMP” tattoo in this ostensibly Australian setting gave me quite the giggle. You also have to wonder about the many jarring moments where it’s midnight indoors—think: a wine and reality TV binge in the dark—only for the characters to run into full daylight after what was narratively supposed to be 10 minutes tops. 

But in the same manner that Anna and Gen’s powers make for their own world of mess, Maio Mackay invites us into the fold of her own, earnest in its appeal to identity-making, agency, and allure of the supernatural, yet unapologetic in its lack of polish. 

Perhaps, for Maio Mackay, this was another messy skin to shed before reaching what very well could be her best. She’s even got a new film in the works, produced by I Saw the TV Glow’s Jane Schoenbrun. 

All things considered: when the world is going to shit, and the masses are all fujo’ed out, incoherent yuri (girl stuff, if you will) can set us free—even if we have to confront the mess eventually.