English experimentalist Ben Rivers offers up another challenging, intriguing cine-poem, this time on the nature of existence and the end of the world. It is opaque but with flashes of strange brilliance, an adaptation of The Word for Snow, a one-act stage play by Don DeLillo from 2007 that reflected on the climate crisis.
A child called Moon (Moon Guo Barker) wanders around a strange world, entirely peopled by other children, except for one eerie monochrome sequence in which Moon sees adult figures in some kind of underground tunnel, frozen in attitudes of dismay similar to the citizenry of Pompeii. In the course of her travels, bookended by clambering out of a crashed car and finally driving happily off, Moon has dreamlike encounters with these children who speak with the tongues of adult prophets. She also exchanges pungent and often memorable micro-insights or haikus or aperçus about the nature of humanity in this postapocalyptic world.
“The word for snow will be the snow,” says one, evidently foreseeing a time when language itself will be scorched away by some cosmic fatality. The scenario is not entirely unlike the super-rich Wall Street trader cruising affectlessly around the Manhattan streets in his stretch limo in DeLillo’s novella Cosmopolis, exchanging gnomic dialogue with the people in his life; this was filmed by David Cronenberg with Robert Pattinson in the lead role.
Moon meets three weird child sisters, like something from Shakespeare, and then a child scholar whose words are interpreted by a child translator; she is met by various other infant devils or angels or lost souls. There is also a scene in which a Minotaur figure roams a maze, filmed in the (rather amazing) Lithica labyrinth in Menorca, Spain, a colossal stone land artwork. At one stage, Rivers’s camera locates a gravestone with a single handprint, as if humanity has found a primitive, wordless way of commemorating its own demise.
The film is like a slo-mo Lord of the Flies (but without the violence) in a style not far from Pasolini’s ancient Greek dramas, and its uncanny quality creeps up on you. This applies even (or especially) to the dialogue put in the mouths of the children, which although occasionally stilted, has its own unearthly, somnambulist ring, as if an alien intelligence is ventriloquising its views through these innocents. Is all this a “mare’s nest”, in the sense of it being a complicated situation in which an illusory or misleading significance is to be found? Perhaps. In any event, Rivers has an ancient-mariner confidence in his stern, enigmatic address to the audience.
• Mare’s Nest screened at the Locarno film festival
