It’s an early sign of trouble that we spend so much of Girl watching Lara—the heroine of the controversial Belgian film, now streaming on Netflix—looking at herself in the mirror. Lara, played by cisgender actor Victor Polster, is a young trans woman who, with her father’s blessing, has begun the rigorous process of transitioning, regularly taking puberty inhibitors and meeting with doctors and a counselor to plan next steps, including surgery. She’s an aspiring dancer to boot, and has been accepted to a new dance school—provisionally, on the condition that she can learn to dance en pointe with the other young women.

Dance is a lifestyle that automatically brings overt attention to the body—as if teenagers need another excuse to over-analyze themselves. A 15-year-old like Lara was already bound to be overwhelmed by the unpredictable physical changes endemic to puberty and exhaustive physical training—to say nothing of all the accordant hormonal and psychological hullabaloo. In Lara’s case, it also can’t help to have a dance instructor surveying one’s body and saying, “Some things can’t be changed”—an overt nod toward Lara’s bad feet, which are less pliable than those of girls who started en pointe at 12, but also a reference to Lara’s body as a whole.

The film treats dance as a limit case for proving what a trans body can and cannot be—and in that regard, Girl, co-written and directed by Lukas Dhont, is a curiously unjust, myopic, even dangerous movie. Its focus on dance feels like an excuse to harp on the physical realities of Lara’s transition. Dhont, deploying the neat, handheld style characteristic of too much contemporary European realism, zeroes in on the bloodied tape on Lara’s bruised and battered toes when she removes her shoes before peeking at the torturously irritating tape over her pelvis. Girl fixates on these images until, at least symbolically, they start to feel like intractable parallels, markers of Lara’s progress toward becoming who it is she wants to become.

It’s no wonder that she spends so much time in the bathroom, peering at herself with a sense of shame and expectation, tucking and taping herself so vehemently that she eventually develops an infection and puts her imminent surgery at risk. Trans identity, in this movie, isn’t really an identity. It’s something closer to pristine dance form: you have to work for it. You have to put yourself through hell.

Trans and non-gender-conforming film critics and audiences—writing fearlessly for outlets like The Hollywood Reporter, Out, Reverse Shot, and the B.F.I.—have met this film with at minimum skepticism, but more often with anger. Central complaints accuse Girl of fundamentally misunderstanding the physical and medical experience of being trans, despite the film’s hyper-focus on precisely these experiences.

There’s the issue of Polster’s casting, for example, which offends not just because of a trend that finds cis, often straight men cast in trans roles, to much acclaim; Jared Leto won an Oscar for one such role, and Eddie Redmayne was nominated for another. (A trans actor has never been nominated for an Academy Award.) That’s part of it, but only part. As the insightful trans critic Oliver Whitney noted in T.H.R., Lara’s puberty blockers would prevent precisely the physical qualities that male-bodied Polster can’t help but exhibit. His casting doesn’t make sense for the very personhood it’s meant to represent.

Yet the film’s broader industry reception has belied the opinions of the trans community. Girl has been met with an unusual degree of success for a first feature—or, really, for any movie. It debuted last year at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Camera d’Or prize for best first film, best performance in the Un Certain Regard competition (for Polster), the FIPRESCI International Critics’ Prize for Un Certain Regard, and perhaps most misleadingly, the Queer Palm award. It became a best-foreign-language-film nominee at the 76th Golden Globe Awards, against titans like Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. Belgium made it its official selection for the foreign-language category at the Academy Awards, where it was long-listed, eventually failing to drum up a nomination.