Mark Reviews Movies: WANDER DARKLY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 10, 2020

If there is life after death, one can only hope it's not as dull and irritating as the one potentially depicted in Wander Darkly. Here, a woman who clearly dies in a car accident is guided through her relationship with her boyfriend by that boyfriend, who either is also dead or somehow can speak to the dead.

Then again, maybe the woman isn't dead, even though we see her dead body on a stretcher and being put into the morgue, and everything that happens is just some kind of fugue state, brought upon by trauma and a concussion. That's the central and only question of writer/director Tara Miele's movie: What the hell is going on here?

Either of the obvious answers feels cheap, but even cheaper is how Miele refuses to give us a straight answer until the very end, meaning that the story's internal logic is non-existent. If any of this made sense, we'd know the answer right away, and the whole point of this movie is to keep us in the dark for as long as possible. Once we get the real answer, it's only fodder for further frustration.

All of the narrative toying here is painfully obvious, because the story beneath the layers of flashbacks and dreams or post-death visions is pretty hollow. The couple consists of Adrienne (Sienna Miller) and Matteo (Diego Luna), who greet a newborn baby, get into an argument over the course of a date night shortly after, and end up in a head-on collision with a truck on the drive home. Adrienne awakens in the hospital, standing outside her own lifeless body.

To be fair, Miele's technique for depicting the afterlife or Adrienne's state of mental disconnection from the world is admirably simple and direct. Adrienne leaves the hospital and walks right into a future without her.

Stepping outside, she's suddenly at the walkway to the church where her funeral is being held. Following a distraught Matteo, she's instantly back at home, where her mother (played by Beth Grant) is upset that Matteo is giving up on raising his child. After another short walk, Adrienne is in her parents' house, watching as the child's grandparents are preparing a nursery, and in a flash, the child is now a teenager, distressed to learn that the now-absent parents may never have loved each other.

That notion becomes the superficial question of this story: What was the true nature of this relationship? After trying to jump off a bridge, Adrienne is confronted by Matteo, who insists that she isn't dead—just confused. Matteo proceeds to tell Adrienne the story of their relationship, in order to prove that he loved her and that her visions of the future are inaccurate. He's simply not the kind of guy who would abandon his child.

The conceit is kind of clever, with flashbacks revealing themselves within a tiny room, expanding, and flowing freely from one highlight to the next. Adrienne and Matteo are aware they're within these memories and offer commentary upon what's happening. Most of these scenes aren't particularly enlightening or even too interesting. There are some groaners, though, both of the overly sappy (a trip to Mexico, where the couple is lovey-dovey in the ocean) and unintentionally funny (Matteo running away after the room where they first have sex catches on fire, because Adrienne lit far too many candles) varieties.

Meanwhile, Adrienne is convinced that some threatening figure of doom is coming closer, and we learn that the biggest problem for the couple was jealousy: Adrienne of Matteo's friend, who keeps giving him work away from home, and Matteo of Adrienne's co-worker, whose presence always lights up her face. The real impression is of two shallow people, who won't let even a matter as consequential as death get in the way of their need to bicker. There's a realm of possibility in this gimmick, whether it's actually an afterlife or some delusion brought about by physical and emotional trauma, but Miele's focus—on the trivial, repetitive melodrama of a relationship that is this thinly established—is narrow and shortsighted.

It genuinely doesn't help that we're never certain what the truth of this gimmick is, either. Miele wants us to wonder at that truth, seemingly confirming but constantly contradicting both of the more obvious possibilities, for no reason but to keep us questioning the story's reality. If this relationship were more involving, those questions wouldn't matter, but because it's not, they're the only things that do matter. As for the truth of what's really happening in Wander Darkly, it turns out to be a big, manipulative cheat.

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