Welcome to the Vestalis Academy, where all the girls are ‘clean’ and disturbingly obedient. Level by level, year by year, they ascend to virtuous worthiness, dispassionately raised for their ultimate purpose—and it’s not to find a good home as they are repeatedly promised. Naïve and compliant, they are shuffled from bed to meal to watching 1930’s films of subservient female behavior.
Dressed like factory workers circa “1984,” the girls are trained to be respectful, humble and patient. Fall out of favor with the Academy’s headmistress, Miss Brixil (Sarah Canning) and you’re taken “downstairs” for brutal punishment. Sadly, the girls have never experienced sunlight and are taught that the air outside their drab-grey warehoused environment is poisonous.
Trying to figure out the end game in “Level 16” is what keeps this film moving. A thriller that obliquely mirrors “Handmaid’s Tale,” we watch and learn as our helpless teens are groomed for what we can only guess is something very nefarious. Some girls are rewarded and others are punished as they thread the needle through the Academy’s bizarre code and ‘training.’
Teen Vivien (Katie Douglas) felt the wrath of Miss Brixil first hand when trying to help friend Sophia (Celina Martin) during their level 10 training. They meet again as BFFs in Level 16 and slowly begin to hatch an escape plan.
Sarah Canning plays up her Nurse Diesel role, occasionally going over the top in her badass BDSM persona. We sometimes see this ‘empress without her clothes,’ vying for attention as both oppressor and ambitious business-driven matriarch. Peter Outerbridge plays the deliciously cruel Dr. Miro, the patriarch of Vestalis Academy, doling out verbal and physical threats and keeping track of profits in a ‘school’ that is all business and bottom line.
Canadian filmmaker Danishka Esterhazy leads his characters through the obligatory steps of hope in the face of a villainous antagonist that is both person and place. We are ‘bread-crumbed’ to the climax in carefully designed scenes that tease us for more. And when the final reveal of the Academy’s true intention makes its graphic debut, we see how horror meets greed in Level 16.
As in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Level 16 underscores how teens can be manipulated to follow and obey all that is inhuman. And how one courageous act can domino into a rebellion that frees many from the yoke of oppression. Yet unlike “Handmaid’s Tale,” the Vestalis Academy’s ultimate goal is one of personal aggrandizement that could have exploited young boys in much the same way.
