RIDDLE OF FIRE - Mark Reviews Movies

Riddle of Fire, Yellow Veil Pictures / Vinegar Syndrome

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 21, 2024

There's an innocent, sweet bit of rebelliousness to the early sections of Riddle of Fire, which follows three kids on a string of adventures across their little slice of Wyoming. Oh, the kids aren't innocent, to be sure, since their first escapade involves breaking into a warehouse and stealing a video game console, but at least the idea behind the crime gets at something honest. Kids just want to have fun, and they'll do just about anything to ensure that they do.

Writer/director Weston Razooli, making his feature debut, sees this fun-loving impulse as something almost mythical. The story here is presented as a thing of folklore, with the movie opening with a little girl reciting a rhyme, dialogue that sounds generally old-timey on multiple occasions, and a cast of supporting characters who may look like very modern folks but fit into some archetype that one would find in a fairy tale.

There's a witch, a baker, a hunter, a woodland fairy, a self-proclaimed troubadour, and, for some reason, a kid with blue skin hanging around in a nightclub. The blue child is anyone's guess, but his presence still suggests an element of fantasy within a setting that's anything but fantastical.

It's an intriguing gimmick and a fun one for a little bit, especially when the material stays within the realm of the innocence of childhood, perceived by those kids as some vital quest. The joke wears thin, though, and once things turn a bit darker, it's tougher to accept as just an entertaining lark.

The three children are Alice (Phoebe Ferro), her best friend Hazel (Charlie Stover), and his younger brother Jodie (Skyler Peters). The trio are on summer vacation from school and about to head to a racing camp in a couple of days—an event that will take them away from home and take up the whole of their break. They might love riding motorbikes, but what the three really want to do with their time off is to play video games. With only a couple of days to get in as much gaming as possible, they have to start playing their newly and illegally acquired system as soon as possible.

There's a problem, of course. Hazel and Jodie's mother (played by Danielle Hoetmer) has put a password on the television in the living room. Even laid up in bed with a bad cold, mom sees right through the charade of the three playing nice and polite to get the code. She makes the kids a deal: If they can get her a blueberry pie, she'll let them play video games for a couple of hours.

The simplicity of this setup is a big reason the material is so endearing at first. It harkens back to those youthful days and memories of everything being more significant than it probably is in reality, of time being a precious commodity that has to be used in just the right way, of errands feeling like little missions to accomplish, and of logic not really playing into things, because most kids probably don't consider, for example, that there's probably more than one way to obtain or bake a pie.

Such is the dilemma here. The kids visit the local bakery, only to discover that the shop is out of blueberry pie. They make their way to the home of the baker (played by Colleen Baum), who's also ill, but she'll give the three her secret recipe if they obtain something special for her. Every turn here is another problem to solve, another person giving them a task, and another opportunity for the kids to use their cunning to figure out how to work out or work around the obstacle in their way. It's all in the spirit of a fairy tale, and even though this particular tale exists in the modern and real world, Razooli's decision to shoot on 16 mm film gives it the dreamy air of fantasy and the look of something from the past.

Eventually, Razooli feels compelled to raise the stakes here, and that's both in keeping with the notion of a fairy tale and a miscalculation in the specific ways the filmmaker attempts it. After a mysterious hunter named John Redrye (Charles Halford) takes the last carton of eggs from the grocery store, our young heroes decide to steal the eggs from him. That puts them in the vicinity of cult leader Anna-Freya Hollyhock (Lio Tipton), who's basically a witch (The daughter, played by Lorelei Olivia Mote, is essentially a fairy princess) with a quest—to find and kill some magical figure in the woods.

There's something off about the movie from this section onward. Some of it is how much time is devoted to these villains, but most of it is how the modern setting clashes with the fairy tale element, especially when it comes to how frequently these kids are in peril.

The real world is always present here, making the adults' threats against the children too menacing and that scene in the nightclub feel too sinister for the otherwise innocent tone of what has been established. Beyond that, though, Riddle of Fire simply doesn't possess enough ideas to carry what's basically an experiment in tone and juxtaposition for as long as it tries.

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