Review: Weather Girl

Some people say that sin enters the world at 4am. That’s the time an out-of-control forest fire might jump the highway and rip through a suburban neighbourhood. Or Stacey, a Californian weather girl, might find herself in a stranger’s sports car, careening towards a catastrophe of her own.

A sharp, unsettling text by Brian Watkins (of Amazon’s neo-Western sci-fi Outer Range) is performed with dizzying intensity by Julia McDermott in her Fringe debut. As Stacey she is nauseous, day-drunk and unsteady on her teetering heels, caged in by monitors and mic stands and what is sometimes a huge swathe of green screen. California wakes up to her forecast every morning, but no one ever listens to her. As temperatures rise, the stale prosecco in her Stanley Cup is no longer enough to quench her fears. Slick, minimal lighting mimics the surreal flash of production cameras, adding to the brutal pace set by director Tyne Rafaeli.

A twisty thriller with echoes of Chuck Palahniuk in its cartoonish approach to a nightmarish reality, Weather Girl is less cynical than its opening gambit implies. Beyond the toxic smoke there’s a magical, almost naïve, sense of hope. But like a drop of water in the desert, is it enough?