THE MOVEABLE FEST: SXSW 2023 Review: A Dire Prognosis Opens Up Emotional Floodgates in Molly McGlynn’s “Bloody Hell”
March 14, 2023
"You can’t be prepared for the kind of diagnosis that befalls Lindy (Maddie Ziegler) at 16 in “Bloody Hell,” but if anyone was, it would be her – a track star who’s asked onto the Varsity squad to run the 100 meters even though her friend Phoebe (Djouliet Amara) has seniority on her and boasting a supportive mother (Emily Hampshire) who went through her own medical ordeal with breast cancer and lives to tell about it. Nonetheless, the room appears to warp around her as if the rug of her entire reality was pulled from under her upon learning from her doctor that she has MRKH Syndrome, a rare malady in which much of her reproductive system is essentially nonfunctional or as it’s put colloquially, “a blind vagina” that is going to prevent her from having children later in life without some kind of surgery and is a source of deep discomfort now when most of her peers are starting to have their periods."
