M: Beyond The Wasteland

Bluesky

The Leaf Child lives deep in the Enchanted Forest, safe from the outside world, of which he knows nothing. One day he will grow big and strong and he will leave the forest and go the the Stone Valley, where he will find his fairy. This is the story that Marko (Matej Sivakov) has grown up with; the one in his picture book, the one he talks about all the time with his father (Sasko Kocev). But sometimes life doesn’t wait for us to be ready before forcing us to act.

A low budget independent film made in Macedonia, M: Beyond The Wasteland is set in a dystopian future world with which many viewers will be familiar, but it’s quite a different thing to watch, in part because of the way it handles the relationship between Marko and his father, and in part because of the delicacy with which director Vardan Tozija handles his actors. The level of empathy which this enables transforms the experience, whilst the stakes feel higher and the possibilities more open because we see much of it from a child’s point of view.

From the start, there’s something off about the way that the father interacts with his son. You may find yourself wondering if they are really related, or if the situation is abusive. Living in a cabin deep in the woods, Marko can’t remember ever having met another person, though he has seen them in pictures. He has been taught to treat everybody else with suspicion; and yet when they settle down at night, the father handcuffs himself to the stair rail before throwing the boy the key. By day he stalks the forest with his rifle, sometimes bringing back game. The boy sometimes helps with foraging and other household tasks, and sometimes plays by the stream. He is cautioned not to make much noise. It’s easy to get in trouble and get yelled at, which frightens him. Sometimes the man drinks, and then it’s really scary.

What might the man be going through? We do gradually learn more, and though he is never wholly sympathetic, Kocev’s heartbreaking performance will leave you wondering how you would cope in a situation like that, year after year. Regardless, Marko is getting older and the boundaries of his imaginative world are beginning to expand. One day he wanders beyond the stream and meets another boy, Miko (Aleksandar Nichovski), who has Down syndrome. At first hesitant, the two quickly bond over a toy car and a spaceman. The innocent joy of this friendship heralds a change in Marko’s life that forces him into unknown territory, both literal and psychological. Soon the two will embark on a journey far stranger than anything that picture book hinted at.

Though the story is slight, it’s well crafted. We learn everything important early on, but Marko’s own lack of understanding makes it difficult to anticipate how things will develop. The children’s innocence wins them support in some situations and places them in danger in others, with adults just as unpredictable in that world as they are in our own. Marko is not too young for most viewers to be able to identify with him, and sometimes Miko has his moments too, proving to be a little shrewder. Their interactions, and some of the adult behaviours which they scarcely notice or understand, give the film real emotional depth. One might draw comparisons with the recent Parvulos but this is really its own thing, and comes from a more innocent place, even as some moments reflect on real world tragedies and it reminds us that very young children do cope in horrific situations all the time.

There are action thriller elements here, and plenty of scares, but you won’t need to be a genre fan to admire it, and one hopes that it will attract a wide audience.

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