Wildcat 2024

The film follows Flannery O’Connor, an idiosyncratic young Southern writer and devout Catholic, as she imagines a melodramatic movie trailer in which the crazed, nymphomaniac boarding-house boarder Star Drake drags her hosts into violent trouble. The narrative then unfurls through a blend of imagined episodes and real life, weaving in a mosaic drawn from O’Connor’s short stories—The Comforts of Home, Everything That Rises Must Converge, Good Country People, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Revelation, and Parker’s Back—along with a scene from her novel The Violent Bear It Away and monologues adapted from A Prayer Journal.

After a writing competition win, she heads to New York to seek approval from a publisher for her novel Wise Blood, but resists the request to outline the work. In this pivotal moment, she discusses her project with Robert Lowell, who calls O’Connor his most talented student and with whom she shares mutual romantic feelings, though Lowell ultimately marries Elizabeth Hardwick. On the return trip, she is exhausted and develops facial rashes; doctors reveal lupus, the disease that claimed her father. She hesitates to seek medical care at first, but eventually receives treatment, and there are moments when she must rely on crutches, even slipping on stairs.

Back home, her mother Regina tries to help and support her, even as she occasionally reveals racist prejudices and doesn’t always appreciate Flannery’s abrasive writing. To comfort herself, Flannery buys a peacock. An Irish priest counsels her about her inner struggles; she notes James Joyce’s Ulysses being banned in Ireland, a situation the priest agrees is needless. He urges her to channel charity into her writing and to let her Catholic faith inform her art as a good, patient path forward. After receiving Lowell’s note about his marriage to Hardwick, Flannery settles into a focused, concentrated writing life.

The film closes with an intertitle before the credits informing viewers that O’Connor lived another fourteen years, ultimately succumbing to what she called “the French wolf” lupus. The final on-screen text after the credits quotes her gratitude toward thousands of pigs whose pituitary glands were used for the lupus injections that kept her alive.