There’s a quote from the beloved series Fleabag that I’ve seen taken out-of-context in our clip-based, video content zeitgeist.

The protagonist’s sister, in an attempt to feel a sense of control over her life, gets the most horrendous asymmetrical haircut. Later, the pair storm into the salon where this criminal act was committed and the male hairstylist dismisses them saying, “Hair isn’t everything.”

Our heroine then unleashes a tirade on the coif’s importance: “Hair is everything,” she exclaims.

Bangs (2024) is the first short film produced by Hellgirl Productions, though the talented Montreal-based cast and crew are no strangers to each other. In particular, the friendship between the filmmaker and comedian Nancy Webb and the photographer and actor Emelia Hellman is clear in the good-natured conversation they share with me the day before Bangs premieres at the Fantasia Film Festival.

Hellman and Webb co-wrote the film, with Webb directing and Hellman leading a cast of Montreal’s most sure footed improv comedians. Screened alongside nine other shorts, Bangs is programmed as part of Les Fantastiques week-ends du cinéma québécois, where a record 100 Québec-produced short films are shown over the festival’s run.

On the night of her 30^th birthday, while she awaits her dinner party guests, Hellman’s character hacks at her fringe before the mirror and gazes wide-eyed at the change she appears to immediately regret and then bravely embrace. As her guests arrive, she greets them, anticipating their reactions to her transformation. But no acknowledgement comes. No response to indicate whether her impulsive shearing was a stylish success or a veiled cry for help. And therein lies the psycho–thriller fun of Bangs.

“We were interested in the idea of the creation of a new persona when you turn 30,” says Webb. “There is an existential crisis that happens in the 30s. It feels like, ‘I don’t know exactly what I want, but if I don’t get exactly what I want, I’m going to lose my mind!’ It’s a very urgent need, to know who you are, and performing that in front of your friends, and having that all hit the fan.”

Leading lady and co-writer Hellman offers thoughtful insight about women’s hair in cinema.

“For women, especially in film, cutting hair is so loaded,” she notes. “When a woman needs to make a change, or goes through a trauma, it’s often signified through cutting her hair, and we wanted to play with that and satirize that. Specifically, you almost always regret cutting your own bangs. And yet, we are endlessly compelled to do it.”

Webb adds that she got to experience the scrutiny, the concern, and the pop cultural baggage that comes with being a woman who shaved her head when she buzzed her own a few years after her 30th birthday.

“I have alopecia, so I thought, ‘why not try it?’ But I did wonder if friends were going to start sending me concerned texts,” she laughs.

In her 2015 autobiographical exploration entitled Girls Will Be Girls, Dr. Emer O’Toole, who is Assistant Professor of Irish Performance Studies at Concordia University, writes thoughtfully about how shaving her head seemed to make people assume she was aggressive and abrasive, while leaving her legs and armpits unshaven marked her stark raving mad. 

Hellman reminds us that women wandering through cinema insisting upon their sanity while losing it at every well-meaning friend and lover condescending to her madness is a canonical trope of its own. “There is power and agency in being able to decide how you look,” says Webb. “But there’s also so much scrutiny around women’s bodies. It’s a real hellscape.”

The influence of Rosemary’s Baby, for example, is keenly felt in this film, while the dialogue between the increasingly unhinged hostess and her guests is hilariously improvised in the style of Portlandia, or Bridesmaids, where comedic chemistry crackles between well-paced scenes. 

Webb and Hellman credit their score composer, Ryan Dodgson, and Naomi Silver-Vézina, Bangs’s director of photography, for helping to strike a balance between creating the tension key to a thriller’s premise while allowing just enough room for laughs. “We really wanted to externalize the terror,” explains Webb, “and that’s why we went with a thriller-horror vibe.”

As our self-consciousness in the world multiplies in the age of information, we look to genre storytelling to make sense of ourselves. More than other local platforms, the Fantasia Film Festival delivers audiences the next generation of creative filmmakers who bring their unique sensibilities to the fore.

Slasher and thriller subgenres are always reflections of the anxieties of their age, and Bangs drives home a deeply resonant, vain, and nonetheless universally relatable hang-up of millennial women.

Hair may not be everything, but it frames our faces, and in doing so, shapes our identities.◼︎

_{Cover image: Emelia Hellman for Hellgirl Productions.}