If the end of the world left the children in charge, what kind of future might they build? This question simmers underneath a surface of experimentation and fable in Ben Rivers’ latest feature, Mare’s Nest. Divided into chapters with names like, “Anarchy,” “The Word For Snow,” “Moon Meets a Community,” and “Ah, Liberty!”, the film follows a young girl, Moon (Moon Guo Barker), as she wanders the rocky outcrops of an unnamed island (the film was shot, in part, on the island of Menorca); converses with an ancient scholar and her translator (in an adaptation of the Don DeLillo play, The Word For Snow); and encounters other children who have formed an improvised but peaceful community, in a bid to find answers to what happened to the post-apocalyptic world around her.
The effect of Moon’s wanderings is a feeling of uncertainty bolstered by youthful optimism. She is a curious child, more often determined to find answers where seemingly there are none and continue unabated when one avenue of inquiry turns into a dead end, than to sink into resignation. Moon’s buoyancy is a useful counterbalance to the feeling of accumulative dread about the illogic of the present day that Rivers has said inspired Mare’s Nest. Indicative of the unreality of the present day, one scene shows Moon coming across an abandoned tunnel where adults are frozen in grotesque, borderline baroque poses, like the famous lovers of Pompeii, though without the pang of curtailed romance. The inclusion of the DeLillo play from 2007, written in response to the ongoing but largely ignored global climate crisis, also makes sense. The play’s grim intonations, voiced by two child actors playing The Scholar (Astrid Ihora) and The Translator (Elahni-Ja’nai Nembhard), that “the world is an open wound,” and “this is what will remain… the names in your head,” ultimately fall to Rivers’ more hopeful but open-ended ideas about freedom and exploration.
The community of children Moon takes up with briefly isn’t a straightforward antidote, either. Their peaceful tranquility is carried on an air of complacency. Their games of chess with found objects, their bonfire dances, even their improbably homemade movies, suggest a clan of people satisfied by their own self-sufficiency. But Mare’s Nest is not a film that envisions complacency in any direction, either towards the cynicism of The Translator or the insulation of the community of children. As a title, Mare’s Nest does double duty, indicating toward a constant stream of illusions — one remarkable scene depicts the screening of a film, seemingly of their the children’s own creation, about a minotaur that accidentally kills one of their own and is banished to a rock labyrinth from which it can’t escape — and to post-apocalyptic chaos. Answers to the world’s illusions and chaos are elusive, but what Moon’s experiences lack in explicative material, they make up for in signifiers and ritual. A young boy plays his keyboard behind an old caravan like a little folk hero, while another reigns over a scrapyard, listening, inexplicably, to “Too Many Questions” by Frustration on a disused car’s radio.
There’s a delightful, handmade quality to Mare’s Nest. The beautiful texture of the super-16mm film gives life to the similarly handmade objects in the isolated worlds Rivers and his young collaborators invented. A hand- (or foot-) powered film projector, a chess board of found objects, a string instrument made of old bicycles. In any other film, they would probably feel like cloying attempts at whimsy. Here, they’re the unconventional outcrops of a life lived on the margins. It’s no surprise, then, that Mare’s Nest never really resembles the post-apocalyptic doom found in most other cinema, nor the primal energy of Lord of the Flies. There is a confluence of pleasure and frustration as the dense content of the film’s source materials — among them Fernando Pessoa’s The Mariner and OOL by Daisy Hildyard — find their place in its lively, experimental verve. For all the attention and surrender it sometimes demands of the viewer, there is pleasure in simply being offered the challenge.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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