by Hudson Moura
The Bearded Girl, written and directed by Jody Wilson, is a clever, witty, modern, and joyful film that works as both a fable and a coming-of-age story. Set in a matriarchal society of bearded women led by Jessica Paré, the film follows a family whose identity, history, and livelihood are tied to a circus-freak-show world inhabited by a rich diversity of characters: little people, conjoined brothers, and other bodies and presences that turn this community into a spectacle, but also into a space of belonging. Yet this world is under threat, as developers seek to take over their land, giving the film an additional political layer beneath its playful and colourful surface.
The film’s main image immediately evokes Stéphanie Di Giusto’s Rosalie (read my review here), and the resemblances do not stop there. Like Rosalie, The Bearded Girl is deeply concerned with how difference is perceived, judged, and controlled by society. Once Cleo grows older, the film shifts more clearly toward her personal journey. The teenage bearded girl wants to live a “normal” life: to shave her beard, to integrate into the community like anybody else, and to escape the role that seems already written for her by family history and social expectation. From that point on, the film becomes another kind of journey, both interior and exterior, based on first love, self-discovery, and the uncertainties of coming of age.
Like Rosalie, Cleo is forced to confront the way society imposes a gaze upon her, defining her in advance as a freak, an anomaly, or an outsider. The film is especially compelling in the way it shows that this gaze is not neutral: it is judgmental, reductive, and cruel. Cleo must therefore learn not only how to live with herself, but how to deconstruct, educate, embrace, or escape the scrutiny that surrounds her. In this sense, The Bearded Girl is less about physical difference itself than about the meanings society attaches to that difference and the emotional burden that comes from being constantly looked at and categorized.
What makes the film particularly interesting is that it approaches these questions through a colourful visual world shaped by a kind of 1970s cowboy production design, which pushes the film toward comedy, stylization, and pastiche. This aesthetic choice gives the film a distinctive tone. It allows Wilson to construct a world that is eccentric and theatrical without losing emotional sincerity. Beneath the humour and spectacle, Cleo’s questions remain intense and very real.
Anwen O’Driscoll gives a strong performance as Cleo, conveying well the emotional complexity of a young woman caught between inheritance and desire, between belonging to her family’s world and wanting something beyond it. Her performance gives weight to the character’s internal struggle and helps anchor the film’s more whimsical and stylized elements.
Like Rosalie, The Bearded Girl asks what it means to live under the gaze of others when one’s body is read as abnormal or excessive. But it does so in its own register: more colourful, more playful, and more openly shaped by fable and spectacle. Jody Wilson’s film is therefore both entertaining and meaningful, a vibrant coming-of-age tale about learning how to live with a body and an identity that society insists on treating as other.
The film is the closing session of the Canadian Film Fest in Toronto 2026.
Rating: 4/5