Review by Seth Troyer
A woman singing, alone in a warehouse bathed in violet light. A horse in a frozen landscape. A battered young man in a dead city, staring at the moon. These are just a few of the many mystifying images we are left with once The Wanting Mare fades to black. It's an epic transmission from a dying fantasy world that washes over the viewer with the subtle mystery of a poem.
The post apocalypse genre, as of late, has become associated with young adult page turners. While this film showcases young characters yearning for a better life, Mare has far more to do with films like Tarkovsky's Stalker than it does The Hunger Games. This directorial debut from Nicholas Ashe Bateman is a feast for the eyes, mind, and heart.
It's increasingly rare to see such a richly original fantasy film that comes straight from its director. It is a multi-generational story set in and around Withren, a seemingly lawless seaside city in a world ravaged by natural disaster. On the outskirts of the city lives a young woman named Moira (Christine Kellogg-Darrin) who lives alone in a shack endlessly recalling a dream her mother shared with her just before she died, a dream of “the world before.” Moira’s solitary existence is interrupted by the coming of a young man named Lawrence who is wounded in a shootout over one of the mysterious tickets.
The tickets allow safe passage on one of the ships that transport the city's greatest export, horses, to the mysterious and coveted island of Levithan. The two ultimately fall in love and set their sights on one day reaching this fabled island. What follows is a mystifying journey that progresses decades into the future, eventually involving their children and the ultimate fate of their last hope. All that being said, long-winded discussions of the film's world and intricate plot really only distract from the fact that this film is to be experienced rather than explained.
Bateman is not Tolkien. He does not care to go over every detail of his fictional land, although it absolutely feels as though he has hundreds of pages of typed out worldbuilding he is not showing us.
It makes sense that this was originally pitched to be a series of films. It feels as though a dense fantasy series that could have been milked endlessly on Netflix was instead been expertly cut down to it's barest bones so that only what truly matters about the work remains. Sure, this minimalist approach helps keep this indie film on budget, but more importantly it helps the themes and characters remain ever at the forefront.
This is a story that shifts character focus and even advances decades into the future without warning. Quite often we are thrown into the middle of a sequence or even the end of a sequence and it is left to the viewer to infer and imagine what took place during the moments we were not allowed access to. It is deliberately disorienting, and while this will certainly frustrate mainstream audiences, it will delight those with creative minds and a dissatisfaction with the tired techniques of Hollywood storytelling.
The truth is one never really knows a character by the end of a story, you have only been offered a glimpse into their world, and Bateman rather than fighting this fact, embraces this. The ambiguities on display here, only seem to add to this strange film's believability and scope. The audience is not tethered to an easily relatable hero. Instead we have given a revolving ensemble of unique characters that in the end leave us with the feeling that the actual main character of the film was humanity itself.
Small almost candid scenes of elation or contemplation are favored over tedious plot beats and eye candy action sequences. This is not to say there aren't moments of CGI visual flourish; there are, and they are absolutely stunning. If this is any indication of what Bateman can do, it speaks well of the fact that he worked as visual effects supervisor on The Green Knight, the latest film directed by David Lowery (A Ghost Story).
In science fiction, quite often creators choose one of two paths. Either your offering is bright and full of rocket ships and funny robots, or it is apocalyptic and cruel. While Mare in many ways falls into the latter category, this is by no means Cormac MCcarthy's The Road. In the face of all the darkness on display here, there is an undeniable pro-human optimism bubbling beneath the surface. Love, nostalgia, coincidence, familial ties, and even the belief that a dream could actually have real life importance, all play crucial roles in the motivations of these characters and add to the realism and heartbreak taking place on screen.
The true legitimacy of such character motivations both within the narrative and in real life can of course be endlessly debated, but here, it's hard not to get swept up in empathy that Bateman clearly has for these very human characters. Bateman clearly believes there is good in humanity and value in a lot of what it strives for. That being said, he is honest enough to admit that there might not be very much hope for us in the long run. May we all reach Levithan in one piece.
The Wanting Mare will be available on VOD services Friday, February 5th.