FAIRYLAND - Mark Reviews Movies

Fairyland, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 9, 2025

Years pass in a blink in Fairyland, which traces the relationship between a father and daughter over the course of more than a decade. Many circumstantial things change for the two, but one thing remains constant: They don't quite know how to relate to each other.

We believe this relationship every step of the way in director Andrew Durham's screenplay. It's based on Alysia Abbott's memoir of the same name, which surely accounts for much of the material's authenticity, but the film's flowing, unstoppable sense of time adds something to the elusive, ephemeral nature of the central bond.

The story begins with tragedy, as Steve (Scoot McNairy) is awoken in the middle of the night by a phone call. Durham's camera, though, follows the man's young daughter Alysia (Nessa Dougherty) as the sound wakes her up, the girl stands by the doorway of her parents' bedroom, and she watches, unaware of what's actually happening, as Steve learns that his wife, the girl's mother, has died in a car accident.

After the funeral and some gentle pushback from his mother-in-law Munca (Geena Davis), Steve moves with his daughter to San Francisco circa the early 1970s, where they first live in a house filled with an uncertain number of eccentric and good-hearted people. The story initially seems to be a pretty standard sort of oddball coming-of-age tale, in which Alysia connects with housemates like Johnny (Ryan Thurston), who appreciates the beauty of women's clothing and does the girl's makeup for her for the first time, and Eddie (Cody Fern), who sometimes sleeps on the couch and has a natural, avuncular way about him.

There's a turn here, though, that changes everything. Steve is gay. We learn that shortly after he and Eddie meet, the three spend time together in the city, and Steve rushes his daughter to bed after he and his housemate lock eyes back home. At first, Alysia doesn't think anything of this, since she is just a kid who doesn't understand why Eddie looks different from her when she walks in on him the bathtub. At this age, the only question she asks her father directly about it is if he also has any girlfriends. Since Alysia is also at an age where she has trouble fully understanding death and grief, Steve tells her that he loved her mother too much to ever have another girlfriend.

That statement will mean more than either of these characters could comprehend in this moment, and there's a lot of wisdom in just how much small, seemingly innocuous things come to define who Alysia grows up to be, as well as why there is some distance that forms between the daughter and father. Steve, a struggling writer, eventually is able to afford a place just for himself and Alysia, and with that comes another defining choice. The father, who has had to live his entire life hiding his sexuality, now has newfound freedom to do whatever he wants, and here's another little mystery that emerges: Does Steve think his daughter gets in the way of that?

From her perspective, it certainly seems that way. Why else would he tell young Alysia to take the bus home from school every day, while he works on his writing or spends time looking for mostly casual sexual encounters? Steve tells his daughter that he wants her to learn to be independent, which is, as he'll later put it, a "noble" goal to teach a child—especially one as curious, clever, and empathetic as Alysia. Is that the full extent of his thinking, or does he consider his own independence to have priority over his relationship with his daughter?

Does it even matter what Steve's real motive is? Again, the film is wise in yet a couple more ways here, because Durham does sympathize with Steve, whose life has been one of hardship, shame, repression, and everything else that comes from keeping such a vital part of himself a secret. The filmmaker, though, also understands that a child learns more by example and knows more from actions than words, so when Alysia is a teenager (played by Emilia Jones for the rest of the film), it's only to be expected that she would expect and resent her father's regular absence.

The older girl is still curious and clever, but she has also become moody and embarrassed, especially because she sees homophobia everywhere, even from her friends, and feels the need to keep her father's sexuality a secret as a result. Like her father before her but in a different way, Alysia is just trying to fit in and denying some part of herself in order to do so. Once AIDS becomes an epidemic throughout the country and particularly in the city, she has even more reason to cover up her father's private life.

Durham simply observes these characters and the cycles—of hiding or avoiding, of keeping things to themselves, of not speaking directly or at all to each other—in which they find themselves stuck. The performances from McNairy, Jones, and Dougherty communicate all of this with precision, too.

Time keeps passing in Fairyland. The characters move and, for Steve, find some success or, for Alysia, keep excelling at different schools, each one farther away than the last. Nothing, however, really changes for these two characters' relationship, which feels like a quiet tragedy for two people who are so much alike. It is, though, nothing compared to the tragedy of why that relationship does finally change, because time keeps moving and there's never nearly enough of it.

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