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DIRECTED BY: Ben Rivers
FEATURING: Moon Guo Barker
PLOT: The adventures of a young girl wandering a post-apocalyptic world devoid of adults.
COMMENTS: A girl of about 10 crashes a car into a tree to avoid a turtle in the road, then dictates a long lesson on evolution to the reptile. She encounters other children in a cave before making her way to a cabin, the goal of her quest, where she asks questions of a mysterious Sage (also about 10) who speaks through an Interpreter (also about 10). What follow is an absurdist interrogation where our protagonist, the delightful Moon, tries to figure out “what is happening,” while the serene Sage and intense Interpreter flatly provide answers along the lines of “the God of love and money is dead; only the planet speaks” and “fish are drowning in Great Slave Lake.” The Sage herself occasionally interjects or speaks in tongues (a running joke is that the Sage will say something like “skim milk,” and the Interpreter will helpfully add “She is saying skim milk”). The children deliver all this complex intellectual back-and-forth dialogue with a blank delivery that suggests they only half-understand what is going on—sort of like the audience at this point.
The above sequence is the most memorable part of Mare’s Nest, and it’s actually an in-film performance of Don Delillo’s one-act play “The Word for Snow.” The rest of Mare’s Nest’s episodes may, or may not, have been inspired by DeLillo. My bet is not, because Rivers, who is a painter as well as a filmmaker, seems to have little interest in language, unlike DeLillo. After “The Word for Snow” segment closes, the remaining hour of film is entirely dialogue-free (although a kid does, at one point, screech out some song lyrics while accompanying himself on a vintage Yamaha keyboard). Moon encounters other children living in a state of utopian anarchy, making their own musical instruments, enacting a play about the Minotaur (which is actually Ben Rivers’ standalone 2022 short “The Minotaur”) in the Lithica labyrinth in Menorca, and visiting a kind of museum of adults who are frozen in freakish tableaux vivants, reminiscent of the mummies of Pompeii. The cinematography, some of which is presented as if unspooling on distressed pseudo-vintage film stock, is appealing throughout, reinforcing the notion that Rivers’ primarily interest is visual communication.
It may all be some kind of meditation on the coming obsolescence of language (“what is the point of this language or that language,” says the Interpreter). Or perhaps a premonition of an upcoming social apocalypse which will force humanity to reset its way of life and begin anew. The opening and closing of Mare’s Nest imply a circular narrative structure, although I have no idea how that’s supposed to fit into the movie’s larger themes—and admittedly, I can’t confidently identify what those larger themes might be.
The film is divided into about 7 independent chapters (Moon scrawls the title of each on a chalkboard), with the only genuine link being the presence of Moon and her peers in a world without adults. The project may have worked better as a series of independent shorts than it does as a feature film. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the obsolete idiom “a mare’s nest” refers to an “illusory discovery, something of apparent importance causing excitement but which turns out to be a delusion or a hoax.” This is not the title I would choose for my own movie, but perhaps Rivers was feeling particularly puckish when he picked it.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
