Truth is stranger than fiction, right? Case in point: at last night’s screening of Wildcat at Boston’s Coolidge Corner Theatre, presented by Ethan Hawke and co-writer Shelby Gaines, a pair of nuns sat in the row next to us. It was a beautiful juxtaposition, the two prim devotees politely awaiting the film’s start as the college kids packing the rest of the house shouted at their friends to get them another beer. You can’t make this up — but if anyone could, it’d be Flannery O’Connor.
Wildcat stars Maya Hawke as the Southern Gothic writer, centered mostly on the tumultuous period of her mid-twenties in which she struggled to publish her first novel Wise Blood. During this time O’Connor is diagnosed with lupus, the disease that would eventually kill her, and she returns to her childhood home in rural Georgia to live with her mother Regina (Laura Linney). O’Connor’s life for the next twelve years was hardly cinematic — her daily routine consisted of going to mass and writing in the morning and then recuperating in the afternoon — and so it’s to Wildcat‘s benefit that writer/director Ethan Hawke and co-writer Shelby Gaines make two bold choices in structuring the film.
There’s an intentional obscurity at the start of Mass, the debut feature from writer/director Fran Kranz, that instantly placed it amongst the most intriguing premieres at this year’s 
Motion State Review 