rogs and chickens, dogs and catfish and alligators, an occasional auroch and a little girl named Hush Puppy are just a few of the beasts who cavort onscreen in “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” a lush, luminous fable set in a dreamtime version of the South.

Hush Puppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) lives with her dad (Dwight Henry) in The Bathtub, a poor, wild bayou land surrounded by water, and this is her story, seen through her tiny, fierce perspective as she and the other inhabitants of The Bathtub fight for survival against the elements, outsiders, and even legendary creatures.

The world of The Bathtub is an amazing construction to experience on film, and a delight to explore with Hush Puppy. It might be set in a near-future in which the oceans have been rising fast, but it could just as well be some sort of conglomerated myth space folded together out of our times, built from the nightmares of Katrina, burst levees, harsh class divides and swamp life, all catalyzed through the perspective of a little girl. Somehow for all that it manages to come off not as grim, but as joyous, whether it’s Hush Puppy listening to the hearts of animals in the woods, or her dad fighting off a storm with a shotgun.

Six-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis is magnetic as Hush Puppy, even though she barely speaks beyond a few bits of narration. She is a tiny warrior, wild and independent, who lives in her own dilapidated trailer and lights her stove with a flamethrower, but who loves her daddy who, despite his gruffness, is the mighty center of her world. Her explosion of hair is like a bomb constantly detonating, and as she faces each challenge alongside the other denizens of The Bathtub one could read her story as simply that of a little girl coming of age, or as the origin myth for a future hero of this quasi-fantastical land — if there even need be a difference. A grown-up Hush Puppy would be as at home in a Mad Max movie as in a Lifetime special.

Dwight Henry as her dad is the other pillar of the story, managing always to be both as wretchedly human as any of us and as epic as any dad. We get to explore much of The Bathtub from the back of his raft made out of a truck bed, just as humble and apocalyptically great as so many things in the movie.

First-time director Benh Zetlin has come from nowhere and made real magic here, in the finest tradition of independent filmmaking. It’s a unique, surprising story told with great clarity and vision, a film that defies expectation and categorization, and we hope it’s a trick he can perform again.
For every 100 mediocre movies that get poured over us from Hollywood’s chamber pots, there is one film like “Beasts of the Southern Wild” which makes it impossible to imagine life without the medium of film.