Even on first glance, something seems to be terribly wrong with the Vestalis Academy. Its premises are falling down and in disarray, save for the state-of-the-art CCTV everywhere, and although it’s ostensibly a boarding school for girls, the education they receive is all about feminine propriety; their treatment is clinical and brutal. Unless the girls can learn how to embody attributes such as obedience and cleanliness, they are told, they will never be selected for adoption by one of the prospective families waiting for them to graduate from the school. The girls, constantly separated and combined into new groups to prevent them from forming friendships, pin all of their hopes on this eventual escape. They don’t question why it takes so many years to get to the stage of being adopted. The Vestalis Academy is a terrible place, although they’re all encouraged to see it as a lifeline by the skeleton staff of the formidable Miss Brixil, the resident Dr Miro and a host of guards. They’ve never known anything different, but they long to know what’s outside those walls all the same.
Level 16 is the final stage and the girls are 16 years of age by the time they reach this floor of the Academy. Still borderline illiterate at this age – the education they receive doesn’t stretch to this kind of learning – there seems to be a new emphasis on biology, encouraging the girls to tend to their complexions and take daily vitamins – a kind of Handmaid’s Tale but with medicalisation rather than scripture. But one of the girls, Sophia (Celina Martin) remembers a new arrival into Rose Hall, one of the dedicated zones in Level 16; Vivien (Katie Douglas) helped her once on an earlier level and received punishment for it. So Sophia warns her, although Vivien is reluctant to listen at first: don’t take the vitamins. This is enough to stir some kind of suspicion in Vivien’s mind. The two girls begin to form something uncomfortably like a friendship. It seems that many of the things they thought they knew about the only homes they’ve ever known are false. What else could be going on behind the scenes?
Throughout, Level 16 is a formidably morose piece of cinema. There are moments of respite, largely stemming from the friendship which comes to exist between Vivien and Sophia, with a great performance from the young cast, but even so, the tension never de-escalates and the mood never lifts. To the end credits of this film, you can never fully believe that things are going to be okay, such is the weight of the feeling of conspiring forces here. Tonally, if it resembles anything at all it’s the weird-familiar, alienated world of Antiviral (2012), though made all the more galling here that it’s girls barely beyond childhood who are the key protagonists. And the crumbling, dimly-lit environment where they live is a key component in maintaining this mood.
The idea of traditional ‘feminine accomplishments’ come in for none too subtle critique here, with the quality of the girls’ education reduced down to keeping them, essentially, malleable and mute. Vivien’s faltering efforts to read the names of her peers may underline this with a particularly heavy hand, but it’s interesting to see how director Danishka Esterhazy shows us how completely the girls are disempowered by all of this. Throughout, they’re in information deficit and have to fight twice as hard to overcome the escalating horror of their surroundings. Later, this critique of femininity is linked to another aspect of typically feminine preoccupation in a particularly graphic manner, though to describe this here would spoiler, so I’ll just say that with this reveal the narrative arc is at its most strained – but, it’s more symbolic than completely plausible, perhaps, and still packs a punch (see also: morose tone, above). Certainly the horror aspects of this otherwise grim science fiction kick into a higher gear with this big reveal, though the scale of paranoia by this point is substantial anyway.
Level 16 is not a comfortable viewing experience and for some viewers it may be just too sombre, too plodding: its almost slo-mo cruelty demands a good deal from us as viewers. However, there’s a great deal to reward us too and a lot to unpack regarding big ideas of gender, culture and ethics. This is what sci-fi does best, after all – invite us to pick up some of the threads from its fantasy and see how they relate to our own world. And, ultimately, in the end this is a very pro-female film where two girls fight to transcend their limitations.
Level 16 screened as part of Glasgow Frightfest on March 1st 2019.