2022’s Moon Garden is movie that wears its many influences on its sleeve. I’m not sure it was directly inspired by any or all of these, but I saw similarities to the more imaginative, but rather dark, films of the 80’s that were centered around children, such as Time Bandits and Paperhouse. There’s stop motion animation that immediately brought to my mind the short films of The Brothers Quay. It feels equally influenced by Labyrinth and Pan’s Labyrinth. Unfortunately, this a film that is little more than the sum of its inspirations.
The plot is rather threadbare, really just a framing device for all the imaginative going-ons. Haven Lee Harris is a cherubic little girl who takes a tumble down the stairs after slipping on a toy. And here I thought, in movies, only adults tripped on children’s toys on staircases.
The injury puts her in a coma, and so the bulk of the movie takes place in her mind. There, various elements of her life are twisted into different aspects of a dream world. Her stuffed rhino toy becomes a giant, lumbering sculpture of sorts she can drive. Most notably, a fake pair of dentures she was playing with earlier become the chattering teeth of an otherwise faceless thing incessantly pursuing her.
This creature is like something from any number of modern horror films. It is über-twitchy and levitates around—the kind of thing I have never found scary, though I seem to be considerably in the minority in that regard. It was no surprise to me there will be a scene where it crawls out of a toilet in the kind of filthy bathroom that is only in 90’s music videos and the Saw series.
I wonder what kind of media this girl has been exposed to, given the imagery her mind comes up with. There’s a naked, bald woman with nails sharpened into points. There’s the aforementioned floating menace and that bathroom. There’s a goth guy dancing with an adult version of the girl, and looking not unlike one of the ghouls in Carnival of Souls.
One of the few helpful characters she meets is a magical negro, so I’m surprised that trope is still a thing. In reversed footage, he un-demolishes some sort of weird musical organ that also had strings that can be plucked. I imagine Tom Waits would spontaneously jizz himself dry if he could get his hands on this.
When the villain dispatches with this guy, all that is left is a very tiny piano, which is one of the few touches here I did not detect as being lifted from somewhere else. Similarly, the only trace of the goth ghoul following his demise is a tiny, metal book. It’s like chattering-teeth guy is slowly assembling tokens for a weird new Monopoly game.
The girl’s parents had been arguing horribly before the accident. Now they spend all their time at her bedside in the hospital. She can sometimes see them from a distance. Most of the time, she can hear their voices for a transistor radio she carries around. This is also how she can hear her mom singing “Without You” for about the tenth time, and I so wanted her to learn a second Badfinger song. Also, I’d love to meet any kid her age today who has ever seen such a radio. It’s elements like that which kept me at an arm’s length from the film at all times.
Harris is as good as an actor of her age can be. I had no qualms with her performance. She’s the daughter of the director, though I would not hold that against her.
The parents, on the hand, did not fully sell me on their performances. Brionne Davis yells and glares as her father. Augie Duke grates as the mother, a person who seemed like quite a downer even before the accident. Consider her assessment of a cup of tea Davis brings her: “Mine tastes right because it was made with love. Yours tastes like you’re just doing it so you can get back to whatever it is you care about.” Even their bickering didn’t ring true for me, as these felt more like archetypes than fully-fledged characters.
One of the most curious aspects of this production is the big deal the press releases have made of it being shot on 35mm film stock. Actually, make that “expired 35mm stock”, which seems moot to me, as I didn’t think that film was being made for some years now. I may be wrong about that, but I do know the film looks exactly like what somebody shooting digitally might do with the usual filters and effects.
Despite everything I said here, I appreciated what the filmmakers tried to do with Moon Garden. It has clearly been inspired by many works I also treasure but, unfortunately, it comes up with little that is fresh and new. I would rather see the original films that were influences on this than watch this again. What I find most damning is how the works that influenced this would later send to therapy many of these kids who watched those back in the day. The difference with this movie is nobody will need therapy after seeing it.
Dir: Ryan Stevens Harris
Starring: Haven Lee Harris, Augie Duke, Brionne Davis
Watched on Kanopy