“Mare’s Nest suggests cinema, its drama and its poetry, is still language with the relentless potential for truth.”
Post-apocalyptical art isn’t necessarily given to optimism. Abstract filmmaking flecked with a non-linear, illusive narrative isn’t usually, either. And yet Ben Rivers’ meandering and beguiling, perplexing if precise Mare’s Nest eschews dystopian propriety to thread hope through a series of time-elusive encounters by Moon (Moon Guo Barker, a natural and bright talent), an inquisitive girl roaming a dusty, arid landscape devoid of adults. That’s not to say things are light-hearted; this is not a film prone to giggles, even among its youthful characters. Moon’s adventures are mischievous, however, as she engages a series of adolescent strangers in a quest for meaning across a changing world, untethered from reality.
The filmmaker echoes the exploits of the focal character in his visual and narrative approach to her travels. Rivers shifts between color and black-and-white palettes, and plays with film format, tone and effect across the series of vignettes that give Mare’s Nest its motley structure. Each sketch is deliberate in composition, balanced with contrasting yet complementary signatures that synthesize drama, documentary and poetry. The director tinkers with convention, plying an interpretation of the Don DeLillo drama “The Word for Snow” in one sequence while showcasing his own 2022 short film, The Minotaur, in another. A harshly lit, high-contrast and grainy passage unveils the lone, brief, disturbing appearance of adults. The sections are bound together only broadly, interspersed with intertitles scribbled by Moon in the reassuring handwriting of a child. Her odyssey is fragmented into sometimes divergent moments that are as intentional as they are enigmatic.
The staging of the DeLillo one-act as an abridged, monochromatic chamber drama is the centerpiece of Mare’s Nest, commencing when Moon visits a sage and her interpreter. The three youthful performers circle a fire to trade questions and criticisms both mystifying and direct, a cascade of commentary that shifts between philosophical blabber and astute observation. “The Word for Snow” is a reaction to the climate crisis and that intent complements the global pandemic that spurs Mare’s Nest. The play is just as contemplative of language and memory, too. Moon seeks thoughtful if simple answers, at one point cutting through the obtuse banter by merely asking, “what is happening?” Within the tumult of manufactured catastrophe, however, does human language have any significance, any answers? “They are making words without meaning,” the interpreter admonishes. It’s lofty but sharp rhetoric. When the world is disintegrating, how can letters and words and syllables and sentences capture “what is happening?”
For that matter, how can art encapsulate earth in shambles, year after year on the brink? “We have myth to protect us when history goes mad,” the interpreter chides Moon during her pilgrimage. Maybe so, but Mare’s Nest suggests cinema, its drama and its poetry, is still language with the relentless potential for truth. The enchantment of youth that Moon carries from hut to cave, in conversations with philosophers or turtles, is hope that remains despite the unbearable havoc and disarray of now. Mare’s Nest begins with a wreck and ends with Moon’s smile. In between, art conjures flickers of clarity and purpose and magic, even when everything else begins to wither.