Mare's Nest

Ben Rivers takes on Don DeLillo’s one-act play The Word For Snow with a similarly experimental verve to the approach he has adopted with his previous hybrid work, including Two Years At Sea and 2024’s Bogancloch, which also had its world premiere at Locarno Film Festival. It plays at Thessaloniki Film Festival this week.

Words, in fact, become something of an issue, periodically weighing down what is otherwise a visually arresting mixture of Super 16, monochrome and colour film. Unfolding in episodes, including DeLillo’s play as a chamber piece element, the action revolves around a little girl called Moon (Moon Guo Barker). Her adventures include encounters with a turtle (who the credits inform us has the splendid name of Jeffrey), other children and more, in what we come to assume are post-apocalyptic spaces from which adults have apparently long disappeared. Rivers' dreamlike approach has the quality of memory in places, full of figments and fragments, although that inevitably means some episodes are more engaging than others.

The first, single long take of Moon explaining evolution to a tortoise as she walks along is formally enjoyable and cues us into the rhythms to come.

What you’ll make of the episode which transports DeLillo’s play to a fire-lit cave somewhere where another sage-like child speaks to her via a third child ‘interpreter’ may come down to your embrace of the theatrical. In some ways using children is a canny approach to DeLillo’s deliberately dense and often gnomic scripting. Still, Rivers has proved previously he doesn’t need words in order to be evocative and this section feels laboured compared to what comes before and after as it tussles with words and their usefulness or otherwise in the face of cataclysmic concerns.

It’s when the director's documentary sensibility is at work that Mare’s Nest becomes most engaging. Sometimes he seems content to simply watch the kids play, with them knowing the rules even if we don’t. He also treats us to a film within a film in a segment revolving around the myth of the minotaur, imbued with a found-footage quality thanks to the hand-processing technique Rivers employs.

The most triumphant visuals arrive in a segment which takes us into the sort of post-apocalyptic territory of Peter Watkins’ War Game. In the flickering light of a cave, Moon comes across adults in states of Pompeii-like petrifaction. Some are frozen in an embrace, others in more disturbing positions, marking acts of both violence and love. Real and unreal simultaneously, not everything about Rivers’ film feels balanced but his abstract approach is likely to leave concrete questions settling in your mind as a result.

Reviewed on: 01 Nov 2025