My Name is ‘A’ By Anonymous
For two-thirds of it’s running time, I wasn’t terribly interested in Shane Ryan’s “My Name is ‘A’ By Anonymous.” It’s not because the subject matter was overtly dark or disturbing, but because the film itself was monotonous and kind of boring. On top of that, it seems to follow three disparate stories, based around four young women, who seem to have no personal connection other than they practice self-harm. In and of itself, that is not a boring or uninteresting subject, but the way Ryan tells this story, without an emotional personal connection between the four, is disheartening. The subject deserves better than what Ryan is offering here. However, the last third brings them together for a shared experience, and it’s here where our lack of interest is turned on it’s head by an extended sequence filled with pain and provocation, and Ryan’s film comes into focus. It’s not enough rescue the movie as a whole, but it made having to sit through the first hour worthwhile.
The film is inspired by a true story of Alyssa Bustamante (just known here as Alyssa, and played by Katie Marsh), who killed a 9-year-old neighbor in 2009, which is part of what makes it so frustrating why this film isn’t more compelling for the first hour. All we know about Alyssa is that she spends her days having vulgar conversations with her friend, The Sidekick (Demi Baumann), picking on her younger brother, and videotaping themselves. They also practice cutting, something they share with the other two women we meet in the film, The Performer (Teona Dolnikova) and The Angst (Alex Damiano), although there is an added level of pain added to them in that they both appear to be sexually abused by their fathers. We see moments with each of these characters that make us feel for them, and there’s a scene at the end of the 2nd act of the film is that is devastating featuring The Angst and her father, but we don’t feel a strong pull towards the characters as individuals, which is what makes it so difficult to maintain interest in the film’s gritty, nihilistic tone for the first hour. We known scant few details about these characters, although what we know about The Performer and The Angst gives us plenty to understand their pain, and why they do what they do. The problem is that they are not the leads in our story (what story there is- it’s fairly disjointed), and as leads, Alyssa and The Sidekick lack depth and interest.
In the last third of the film, however, something kicks in. We see the pivotal moment of Alyssa’s story, her killing of her neighbor, and it is painfully beautiful, in a way. Not the act itself, but the way it is laid out by Ryan. It’s not sensationalized or gratuitous, but moving, and feels like the emotional pain the film has tried to illicit pays off in the end. And in the last scene of the movie, we get the impression that all we have seen is not individual people but one person, different aspects of a person who had plenty of darkness in them, but also had light extinguished. It makes us wonder about what we saw in the previous 85 minutes, but is it enough to make us think differently about those 85 minutes? I don’t think so myself, but it makes them somewhat more compelling than they were before. I just don’t know if, knowing what I now know, I could sit through it again and see if it changes my overall opinion of the film.
