Filmmaker Jaina Cipriano's all-female psychodramatic short may remind a few viewers of Paul Thomas Anderson's feature-length The Master (2012), which was material wary of gurus and cult-leader types. Here something similar is boiled down to sketch-scope and with an interesting gender flip.
The setting is Portand, where Zera (Christina Dickinson), a post-graduate Psychology student with an unhappy past, is in a funk, unfulfilled in her Starbucks-barista gig. She reunites with on/off bestie Crystal (Rebecca Dooley), who introduces Zera to her own latest fling, Maxine (Madeline Bugeau-Heartt), a blowsy, bead-covered, larger-than-life sort who styles herself as some sort of personal counselor and sex-positive feminist life-force incarnate.
Maxine strives to lift Zera's spirits with a strange mix of affirmation-cheerleading (everything short of breaking into Broadway-musical-number song) and DIY Wicca/whacky ritual. The treatment propels Zera into a flashback-vision of a birthday with her problematic mother (also Maxine), clad in fetish wear.
It is left somewhat up to the viewer to judge whether Maxine's overbearing, jarring presence has been a positive influence on both the other young women in any way, or not. For a hint, perhaps, re-read the title.
Tech credits and actors are all on their marks, with Dickinson especially soul-wounded. Gyno-fixated language gets into R-rated territory on more than one occasion and nothing much of a sexually explicit nature is made visual. The brief run-time is apt for topics in discussion sessions in and out of film artistry (feminism, charismatic types, the limits of self-help quick fixes, etc.). It might be apt to mention that Cipriano asserts this story is based on fact. Recommended.