MOON GARDEN - Mark Reviews Movies

Moon Garden, Oscilloscope Laboratories

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 18, 2023

Writer/director Ryan Stevens Harris offers up an imaginative, handmade nightmare with Moon Garden. It's a creative, unsettling, and heartfelt film, made with obvious passion and an admirable sense of do-it-yourself craft.

Most of this story, akin to a fairy tale, takes place in the subconscious realm of a child's mind, filled with visions of the slightly familiar, the completely imagined, memories of the past, and, yes, terrors. It all happens because a little girl just wants to escape a particularly angry moment between her parents.

The girl is Emma (Haven Lee Harris, the filmmaker's daughter, which helps to ease how many staged frights and how much performed trauma the young actor has to experience), a perfectly ordinary kid who is awakened by her mother Sara (Augie Duke) in the middle of the night. Her mother has a plan for an impromptu trip, she tells the girl, but it's clear to us that Sara is thinking of leaving her husband Alex (Brionne Davis), a struggling writer who barely makes time for his family and is more than irritable whenever he does.

That leads to a shouting argument between the parents, and after Emma goes into their bedroom to see what's happening, she rushes out, trips on some toys she left behind, and falls down the stairs. Emma comes to inside a world of her imagination, while the devastated parents can only watch, wait, and hope as their daughter is in a coma in the hospital.

What follows in that dream world, of course, makes only a little logical sense, because it's not really supposed to. Emma finds herself surrounded by strange sights and figures, traveling through some dim and overgrown garden, a foggy amalgamation of some kind of industrial setting, a dining room and some other domestic spaces in decay, a vast desert where a giant rhino—like her favorite stuffed animal—roams, and some observatory among the clouds. The director and cinematographer Wolfgang Meyer shoot on 35mm film to add a layer of graininess that accentuates the grimness of this world, as well as the unnatural quality of everyone and everything within it.

As for those figures, they're a strange, mysterious bunch, from a musician (Phillip E. Walker) who plays the melancholy lullaby the girl's mother so often sings, to a groom (Timothy Lee DePriest) who turns Emma into a servant, and to a princess (Maria Olsen) who comes out of an animated storybook. The way Harris mixes mediums is most notable in the story's villain. It's an ever-stalking creature, a trench coat-wearing and faceless void with chattering teeth, brought to life by a combination of stop-motion and actor Morgana Ignis' movements sped up in-camera.

Moon Garden creates a unique world of childhood dreams undercut by harsh reality and youthful fears made tangibly frightening. It's a potent reminder that a film doesn't need a large budget or fancy, computer-aided visual effects to give us a visually striking experience.

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