White Bird in a Blizzard review: Shailene Woodley spreads her wings

Director: Gregg Araki; Screenwriter: Gregg Araki; Starring: Shailene Woodley, Eva Green, Christopher Meloni, Shiloh Fernandez, Angela Bassett, Gabourey Sidibe, Thomas Jane; Running time: 91 mins; Certificate: 15

Shailene Woodley's star continues to rise on a sharp upward trajectory thanks to The Descendants and the Divergent/Insurgent franchise and it may be because she seems wise beyond her years, bringing with her a kind of soulful ennui with the world. Casting her in this adaptation of Scott Heim's novel is also a clever move by writer/director Greg Araki, but the film is ill-judged in various other aspects.

Araki is particularly fascinated by extreme growing pains, with credits including The Doom Generation (1995) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt drama Mysterious Skin (2004) and at the heart of this story is the tragedy of abandonment. Kat Connors (Woodley) is just getting to grips with her changing body – and the boy next door Phil (Shiloh Fernandez) is also getting grips to with it – when her mother (Eva Green) vanishes.

Green delivers a performance of ludicrously gothic proportions, which isn't entirely her fault. Araki is fascinated with her saucer-wide eyes and clownish red lips as, in flashback, she mopes around the house cursing her dull domestic existence in Nowheresville, married to a subservient lunk of a husband (a deliberately blank-faced Christopher Meloni). Araki designs campy dream sequences around her, too, which play like deleted scenes from the Chronicles of Narnia – Green as the white witch, becoming one with a snowy landscape and getting further out of reach.

The visions hint at suppressed trauma, otherwise Kat insists she is much happier without mom around and, in fact, it gives her the freedom to continue exploring her sexual identity (she uses the f-word, rather than getting carried away with notions of lovemaking) initially, with Phil. However, he often seems more concerned with getting stoned, so Kat branches out and drops in on the detective investigating her mother's disappearance. The seduction is absurdly funny, not because she is gauche, but because Thomas Jane plays the part of the burly cop like he just fell out of the pages of a Mills & Boon novel, his hair artfully ruffled – head and chest.

Green delivers a performance of ludicrously gothic proportions, which isn't entirely her fault. Araki is fascinated with her saucer-wide eyes and clownish red lips as, in flashback, she mopes around the house cursing her dull domestic existence...

Kat is far from likeable, but as the story ever so slowly unfolds, she gains self-awareness and becomes a more involving character. Unfortunately, the people in her orbit are little more than caricatures; Ugly Betty's Mark Indelicato is the wisecracking gay friend and Precious star Gabourey Sidibe is the one who tells her to 'Go, girl!' in a picture of small-town life that belongs in a TV teen soap. Even more detrimental to the story, Kat's loosening bond with her dad – which becomes pivotal in her mother's absence – is the least convincing of all the relationships.

Araki has a habit of slowly fading from one scene to the next, perhaps in an effort to create a brooding atmosphere, but it's just plain soporific and the occasional bit of dry comedy offers scant relief. In the end, the closing scenes are the funniest, but unintentionally silly, like a bird gone splat against a windscreen.