UFF 2024: Cuddly Toys

If the unique and unsettling “Cuddly Toys” doesn’t haunt you long after viewing, there may be merely stuffing where a beating heart should be.

Being a woman at any age is wrought with challenges, frustrations, and dangers, seemingly at every turn. That shouldn’t be news to anyone, though the “not all men” and “woke liberal feminist” discourse shows that many think the fears and outcries of women are nothing but hyperbole, paranoia, and misandry.

As hard as it is to be a woman, being a blossoming young woman — from adolescent to preteen to teen and into early twenties — is harder and more perilous still. Girls are forced to come of age amidst a barrage of internal and external forces that combine to wreak mental, emotional, and physical havoc. In the best of circumstances, it’s a confusing and often painful landmine to navigate. From unruly hormones to unrealistic expectations, relentless pressure to merciless scrutiny, constant objectification to dangerous predatory threats, young girls struggle for acceptance in a world of constant criticism and safety in a world of endless betrayal.

Cuddly Toys, with its deceptively adorable title and pleasantly charismatic host, “Professor” Kansas Bowling herself, feels like a quirky and surreal good time from the young filmmaker best known for her Troma-backed hit (made when she was just seventeen), B.C. Butcher.

Though the plot sounds anything but trite — a Mondo documentary about the dangers of being a young woman in a world full of predatory men — Bowling’s unique, stylish, and enticingly offbeat approach to the material belies the devastation of the subject matter.

Inspired by 1960s Italian shockumentaries, the pseudo-documentary film is narrated as if it were a cheesy educational film warning parents about the dangers of raising young girls.

Blending fictional vignettes with supposedly real interviews, intercut with narration from Bowling dressed in a lab coat, long blonde wig, and oversized librarian glasses, there’s an intentionally wry and playful undertone designed to make the tragic tales more palatable.

On the surface, it may even seem like Bowling is mocking the seriousness of the core message with her campy “educational video” presentation shot on 16mm. Instead, however, she is cleverly weaponizing the traits most desired in young women — beauty, unassuming innocence, a demure demeanor — to launch a surprisingly devastating assault on the perpetrators of horrors against women.

It’s a brilliant takedown of toxic masculinity you won’t see coming. Bowling doesn’t come across as an “angry feminist” or a loud-mouthed activist. She’s neither intimidating nor aggressive.

She even convinces you it’s all just good-natured fun, blinding you with an enticing surface shine even as she doggedly peels back the layers of a grim reality of abuse, manipulation, and victimization.

Even the interviews with the young girls featured in the “documentary” seem cunningly benign. Though the content of their stories should be deeply troubling, the matter-of-fact, blasé way with which the sordid tales are presented creates a sense of normalcy.

And that’s precisely the point.

These aren’t stories of shock and awe that feel unimaginable. Rather, these are horrifying experiences understood by women for what they are: tragically commonplace.

The reality of the nightmarish scenarios hits home when we see the grisly reenactments of each girl’s experience. Trigger warnings abound here; this is not an easy watch. It’s chockful of very bad things happening to very young women, including sexual assault and violence.

It’s deeply disturbing and stomach-turning, but it’s also funnier than it has any right to be.

There’s a memorable scene at a murdered girl’s funeral that manages to be equally hilarious and twisted, while everyone — from the uncomfortably creepy priest to the superficial mother — speaks incessantly about the girl’s beauty as if it was the only thing that matters in the world, the only thing that defined her.

Humor is used to diffuse the ugliness of what’s reflected onscreen, making it watchable when it otherwise wouldn’t be… when it shouldn’t be.

However, it also serves a real thematic purpose, illustrating how flippantly we view the trauma of young women, chocking it all up to girls gone wild or “boys will be boys” attitudes of indifference (at best), acceptance, or victim blaming.

It’s not a feminist mantra or a political think piece. It’s just reality, wrapped in the stylish trappings of glossy celluloid to make it feel like less of a bitter pill. It’s satirical but searing, entertaining but enraging, humorous but horrific.

It’s an absolute masterclass in a delicate balance of disparate tones, the cinematic equivalence of offering a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.

Cuddly Toys is one of the most impactful, unsettling, effectively horrifying, and potent films I’ve ever seen.