I Believe in Unicorns

Acclaimed at numerous festivals, this drama’s heroine is a teenager named Davina who escapes her problems by entering a world of luxuriant fantasy. She lives in the suburbs of San Francisco, where she looks after her disabled mother. She falls in love with an older boy and enters into a relationship that is becoming increasingly toxic. To forget her daily troubles, she transports herself into the fairytale world of her imagination, where nothing can hurt her. While there, the outside world appears to be a fake, only pretending to be reality, an entry point to what awaits the lost girl somewhere around the corner. What stands out most clearly in I Believe in Unicorns is the maturity of Leah Meyerhoff’s vision in her feature debut, the screenplay for which was largely based on her own experiences. Somewhere between realism and fantasy, the director has made an original bildungsroman, impressionistic, minimalistic, and poetic, displaying simplicity and subtle symbolism.