Esther Blueburger is not like other girls. And that is part of her problem.

Esther is a 13-year-old Jewish girl growing up in a typical Australian capital city with her twin brother Jacob, her calm but distant father and her neurotic, judgemental mother.

The girls at Esther’s private school pay no attention to her except to criticise the short-for-her-age, braces and glasses-wearing outcast. Otherwise Esther spends her lunch times in a room by herself munching on her sandwich.

Esther’s mother Grace blankly asks her, “Why can’t you be normal, Esther?”. She is similarly stunned and unsympathetic when none of her daughter’s ‘friends’ from school have RSVP’d for her upcoming bat mitzvah.

Esther’s disappointment leads her to kneel face down over a toilet bowl at school and pray, “Are you there, God? Get me out of here. Amen”.

Yes, it may appear profane to look for God down the porcelain, but sometimes it is only when life brings us to our knees that we are in the correct posture for approaching Him.

Esther makes her first meaningful connection with another teenager at her Bat Mitzvah. Sunni is a rough-around-the-edges public school girl but her willingness to accept Esther makes her unlike any other fellow student or family member.

Esther secretly transfers to Sunni’s school and with her help, the once nerdy outcast sheds the glasses, the long daggy skirt and the severely pulled back hair. Soon Esther has made a group of cool, confident friends who accept her.

Esther embraces her masquerade and enthusiastically crosses over into an alternate world in which everything in her life has become reversed. Once bullied, Esther is now in charge. Once the reject, Esther dives boldly into kissing boys and getting piercings. Once the angelic daughter, Esther defiantly shakes up her bewildered family. 

However, while Esther may be able to transform her new high heel shoes into flashy ruby slippers with glue and red sequins, she discovers that it is not quite so easy transform herself.

Sunni chastises Esther when she sees her brutally attack a girl for the sake of a jacket, egged on all the while by her peers. She can see her friend has changed for the worse.

Esther is resentful of Sunni’s suggestion and her behaviour soon spirals downward as she drinks whisky and pushes the boundaries sexually with a teenage boy to prove she is not “frigid… like Sunni”. The scene is cleverly illustrated with Esther all tarted up performing a surreal song and dance number in a neon-lit alley trash bin. Esther is quickly selling herself out for the sake of maintaining a façade she thinks will impress.

“Your whole life is a lie. You can’t just put on a costume to change who you are,” Sunni reminds Esther.

In the Bible Paul admits he had his confidence in outward appearances and respected religious affiliation while he was still Saul, before he encountered Christ on the Damascus road. In Philippians 3 he lists his reasons for such confidence: “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless”. Paul goes on to write how his attitude completely changed following his conversion. He now counted whatever was to his profit as loss for the sake of Christ.

While Esther never experiences such a drastic personal encounter with the divine, she does realise that her superficiality, arrogance and cruelty distanced her from her friends and family. Esther soon realises that she must behave with honesty and integrity towards her family and friends if she is to live rightly with them.

Of course, as Paul writes earlier in Ephesians 2, we are dead in our transgressions until we come into a personal relationship with Christ. It is only then that we can have life to the full.

Warning: Dangerous spiritual bonding

A key scene of Hey Hey It’s Esther Blueburger shows Esther and three other teenage girls bonding and laughing while holding a séance. The film depicts this as a joyful expression of the girls repairing their friendship. However, this supposedly delightful scene will displease some viewers, as many people can attest to the real and significant spiritual danger in these activities.