EIFF 2026: Pretty Babies

Tyler-Marie Evans’ feature debut is a sex work Cinderella story in the mould of Anora. After a childhood spent escaping into old movies, high schoolers Marie (Emily Alyn Lind) and Luna (Sadie Stanley) leave their crummy home lives behind and head for Hollywood.

Pretty Babies crosscuts frequently between actual events and the girls’ imagined lives, handheld footage from Marie’s camcorder and glimpses of the black-and-white films that inspired them. You sometimes get the sense of a first-time filmmaker anxiously throwing everything at the screen, but it effectively conveys the Catherine wheel excitement of the girls as they go spinning off towards disaster.

That same energy is embodied in Stanley’s performance. Luna seems to live every moment with manic intensity, a quality that makes her both magnetic and impossible. It’s the sort of part that can easily become a caricature, the performance getting so big that the reality of the character collapses in on itself, but Stanley ensures that Luna always feels painfully real. Though, for the most part, painful reality isn’t where Pretty Babies thrives. It wields sexual assault like a blunt object, using it on two separate occasions to thud the plot forward in callous fashion.

It’s in the brighter, dreamier sequences where the film is at its most affecting, like the section where Marie strikes up a romance with a boy she meets out on the road. These soft-lit scenes exude a gentleness found nowhere else in her world. It’s gorgeous and sweet, so much so that we know it can’t possibly last. “You make me believe things could be better, even though I know they aren’t,” Marie tells Luna later in the film. In these moments, that’s just how Evans’ film makes us feel too.