The iconic 20th-century Southern writer Flannery O’Connor only published two novels. A new film by actor and director Ethan Hawke looks at her efforts to finalize the first one. The 103-minute movie features Maya Hawke (Stranger Things), Ethan Hawke’s daughter with fellow actor Uma Thurman, as the idiosyncratic O’Connor, a young writer whose devout Roman Catholicism comes into constant relief with the landscape of the American South. Maya Hawke is effective in the central role. She captures O’Connor’s famed charm and bite, as well as her obsessions with God and with her place. For readers of the Georgian, Wildcat gives a literature-charged romp: The movie moves in and out of dream-like sequences extracted from O’Connor’s more than 30 short stories. The result is both that Wildcat seems like it belongs within the O’Connor canon of haunted stories, and, as other critics have pointed out, it isn’t exactly accessible to the unbaptized.
Limited release on May 3, 2024; wide release to follow.