Little Trouble Girls (2025)

Choir Practice from Hell - Little Trouble Girls review by griggs

Little Trouble Girls is one of those debuts that feels way too assured for a first film. Urška Djukic takes the old “Catholic girl’s awakening” setup and gives it a jolt — smart, modern, and quietly intense. The mix of faith, control, and desire is handled so confidently it’s almost uncomfortable to watch.

The sound design is incredible. The music isn’t just background; it shapes everything — sometimes soothing, sometimes suffocating. Saša Tabakovic is brilliant as the choirmaster: charming one minute, quietly predatory the next. He’s got the kind of authority that makes your skin crawl even when he’s smiling.

The rehearsal scenes are where the film really hits. Every breath and glance feels like a battle for control. It’s haunting, beautifully shot, and impossible to shake off. Little Trouble Girls gets under your skin and stays there — not loud or flashy, just quietly devastating.

Original coming-of-age piece in Catholic Slovenia - Little Trouble Girls review by PD

Early on in Urška Djukic’s distinctly original coming-of-age film, a brief montage strings together images of shrines to the Virgin Mary scattered through the mountains, forests, and villages of Slovenia. For a film set in the Catholic milieu of a girls’ choir, a preponderance of Marys isn’t in itself surprising, but with the lack of corresponding images of Jesus (with one arguable exception), it takes on a distinct tinge, perhaps gesturing at the absorption by Catholicism of pagan fertility cults. For the teenage protagonist, Lucija (Jara Sofija Ostan - superb throughout), Mary becomes not only an object not of veneration, but of desire.

Much of the (admirably restrained) film is centred on Lucija's friendship with Ana-Marija, a girl her age but much less sheltered. An ambiguous attraction simmers between them, as the knowing Ana-Marija coaxes Lucija into the mysteries of desire and transgression. When, in a game of truth or dare, Lucija chooses dare to avoid outing her inexperience, Ana-Marija tasks her with kissing 'the most beautiful girl in the school', as a result of which, in an innocently sacrilegious manner, Lucija kisses a statue of the Virgin Mary—a prelude to more flouting of Catholic taboos on the part of both girls. But their relationship comes under threat when Lucija mistakenly confides in the choir conductor, whose reaction, in a psychologically brutal scene, is truly disturbing.

The film’s dreamy cinematography often places the viewer in the perspective of Lucija, prone to trance-like reveries at the sight of beauty, but its the sound design which is particularly effective and wonderfully intimate, simulating the sound of blood ringing in her ears, for instance, when she comes face to face with a naked male labourer who bears a striking resemblance to certain depictions of Jesus. Throughout, Ostan performs her character’s 'virginity' as an ignorance of prejudice, a pre-indoctrinated state of grace if you like, for she is moved by beauty in all its forms, without quite knowing which are considered appropriate for 'good' Catholics. Lucija doesn’t yet recognize a distinction between religious and physical ecstasy, or between friendship and romantic love. She knows no shame or grief, only curiosity. Her desire is unformed, not yet tamed, and this makes her coming of age a bitter one, if not entirely tragic.

A hallucinatory final scene leaves perhaps too many dangling plot threads, but Djukic’s film fascinatingly shows how Catholic moral strictures and an underlying paganism where desire is holy are two sides of the same coin. Disconcertingly, Djukic seems to hint that it’s precisely the intensity of such prohibitions that inspires and gives meaning to the transgression of them. Intriguing stuff.