Ms Green and Other Lovely Beasts: A Comedy of Comforting Sins

Lucy Joan Barnes’s Ms Green and Other Lovely Beasts is a story that sells itself on the dark eccentricity of its protagonist, a post-mortem pet portraitist crushing on her business partner. Populated with murders and murderers, this creepy-cute comedy, written by Nick Thomson, shines in the light of its lead’s pitch perfect performance.

Lauren Koster plays Elnora Green, whose happy place is a graveyard and Ed Gein (Mark Keegan) her imaginary friend. The frustrations of her former career as a pet therapist must have driven her to the mellow and still shadows of the valley of death. In any case, escape from immediate physical reality became essential at some point.

It leads also to such choices as a talking pug (as a puppet for Elnora, just a regular live animal to everyone else), Dziga (voiced by Clark Alexander), whose quick wit fills the emotional and conversational gap made by Elnora’s crush Parker’s (Rohan Singh) obliviousness. He is sweet, almost too innocent, and ostensibly too absorbed with his work as taxidermist to see the only other human in his vicinity bend-and-snapping specifically for his attention.

Green is the undeniable backbone of the whole affair (puppet Dziga may be the femora). She makes Elnora a particularly enjoyable heroine. Elnora is sweet-spoken and snarky, earnest and sarcastic. Patient. Secretly furious. And borderline psychopathic. The insanity is painted delicious, a tongue-in-cheek approach that transfers to other comedic moments, like a swish pan back and forth between Elnora and Dziga. For Elnora and Parker, the tone is softer than fluffy clouds, even as they share in the task of skinning a dead animal.

Ms Green and Other Lovely Beasts is a humorous delicacy. Elnora is the sticky sweet thorn in the side of an overwhelming and overwhelmingly normative world, though she might shy at the mention of such responsibility. Something like a fascinating, luminous insect, she is best left to the environment she can thrive in, only to be observed from a distance. If we learn to behave better, we may get to watch as she befriends even more peculiar beasts of any number of species.

Watch Ms Green and Other Lovely Beasts Short Film Trailer