Before otherworldly elements start to emerge, "The Fits" is reminiscent of much of the work of Céline Sciamma, whose films ("Water Lilies," "Tomboy," "Girlhood") explore various aspects of being a girl. In Sciamma's 2007 film "Water Lilies," a young girl stares longingly at the water-ballet team and wants to be close to the beauty of those older girls, their grace and confidence. In the landscape of childhood and adolescence, peers are all. Peers set the rules of engagement, peers let you know whether you're "in" or "out." Adult figures barely register, and that's the case in "The Fits," which takes place entirely in the community center where kids gather for after-school activities. Toni is drawn to the cacophony emanating from the gym, where the Lionesses (the championship girls' dance team) practice. Like the young lead character in "Water Lilies," Toni peers through the window at the older dancing girls. What does she see in them? A world she wants to enter? A world she is afraid to enter? Either way, when The Lionesses hold auditions for new members, Toni decides to try out.

As soon as she enters the world of girls, strange things start happening, and here is where "The Fits" really makes its impact. One by one, the girls succumb to a mysterious ailment with no apparent root cause. Their bodies flail, they stare up at the ceiling caught in a trance, they writhe on the floor in "fits." The community becomes alarmed and there's speculation that the water at the community center is contaminated. But nobody really knows for sure. The girls who succumb are all older than Toni by a couple of years. Is it a ritual of adolescence? Is it symbolic of "becoming a woman"? Are the "fits" ominous or are they an important rite of passage? Director Holmer, who also wrote the script, doesn't say. "The Fits" is not a film that is easily classified into a nice little genre box. There are sequences that are truly scary, other sequences that are lighthearted.

The attention-getting visual and aural style of the film is one of its strengths. Cinematographer Paul Yee films this strange story in a manner appropriate to the form of the narrative. The community center is filmed like an endlessly vast world, the white walls dazzling and disorienting, girls shrieking with joy up the ramps, the boys locked off in their own hermetically-sealed boxing-gym, the girls' empty locker room and bathroom stalls mysterious spaces where voices echo or the sound drops out. A little girl bounces a basketball against the gym wall, dwarfed by the space around her. Toni stands in the middle of the emptied-out swimming pool, staring at the emptiness of her once-familiar world. Toni and a friend try on their sparkly Lioness costumes and cavort through the community center after-hours, giggling and twirling through the darkness like glittering fairies. Any girl who hasn't had "the fits" yet wonders when her time will come, or why her time hasn't come yet. Girls who have been initiated into "the fits" compare notes: "What was yours like? Mine was like this." The score, by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, adds to the sense of creepy dislocation, time standing still, or at least slowed down.