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| Images courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories |
Ryan Stevens Harris was a filmworker doing everything from sound
design on Roland Emmerich’s Midway to handling editing duties for
Emmerich again with Moonfall before eventually working towards mounting
his own debut feature film Moon Garden: an ethereal, sleepy waking
nightmare told in the tried-and-true tradition of such child-oriented fantasy
horror films as The Company of Wolves and Paperhouse where events
within the real world invariably affects the fabric of dreamland. While the most recent example of children
navigating their way through a very adult oriented funhouse of terrors usually
pointing towards a coming-of-age journey points to Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s
Labyrinth, the Lewis Carroll Alice in Wonderland subgenre of setting
minors loose in big scary looking oppressive set pieces with bizarre and
frightening characters isn’t going away anytime soon.
Originally loosely based on a short film featuring child
actress Haven Lee Harris involving a five-year-old little girl who journeys
into her own lucid dream, Moon Garden tweaks the premise somewhat
involving the same little girl falling into a coma after taking a tumble down a
flight of stairs, sending her feuding parents Sara (Augie Duke) and Alex
(Brionne Davis) into a grief-stricken frenzy.
From here, little girl Emma (Haven Lee Harris) plunges deep into bottomless
rabbit holes, encountering mysterious characters including a Mad Hatter type
character with no face only teeth (think Grace Zabriskie in season three of Twin
Peaks), a black musician painted in withering white makeup played by
Phillip E. Walker, and an elderly princess played by Maria Olsen. Mostly though the film is a first-person
point-of-view hallucinatory psychedelic odyssey through dreamland with the eyes
and ears of a little girl.
While not quite as heavy or repulsive as Terry Gilliam’s Tideland
its every bit as dark and quietly desperate with feelings of grief-drenched
longing radiating throughout the picture even as it devolves into chase
nightmare scenarios. The real star of
the film, however, aren’t the practical effects makeup shots or the editing, production
design and art direction all overseen by Ryan Stevens Harris, not the ethereal
ambient soundscape by Michael Deragon which includes some hasty covers of I Can't Live, but the film’s cinematographer Wolfgang
Meyer. Reportedly shot, developed and
printed on expired 35mm film, the photographic results yield a slightly
deranged image of discoloration that somehow fits into this mercurial
audiovisual netherworld perfectly. Though
mostly working in low budget straight-to-video fare, seeing Meyer’s lab
experiment cinematography gives this film a true implacable otherworldliness
that can’t be easily defined in words.
The indie cast members are mostly fine with Augie Duke fresh
off of the romantic horror film Spring and Brionne Davis as the beleaguered
father having starred in Brian Taylor’s polarizing Mom and Dad, though
the ones doing all the lifting are child actress Haven Lee Harris, director/production
designer Ryan Stevens Harris and the cinematographer. At times the film breaks down into surreal
animated segments which threatens to catapult the film into Heavy Metal or
Mandy territory, but as we’re watching we don’t mind the
similarities. Still, Moon Garden is
less of an actor’s piece of conventional storytelling as it is an experience
that’s somewhat different on the eyes and ears.
Given a limited theatrical release by Oscilloscope
Laboratories in May before hitting streaming not long thereafter, Moon
Garden for all of its spellbinding photochemical innovations failed to
generate a cult audience, grossing a meager near $50K in ticket sales. Still, 35mm prints were struck and exhibited
and recently the film aired on 4K digital platforms, allowing filmgoers who couldn’t
make the limited theatrical screenings a chance to enjoy the surreal kaleidoscopic
netherworld from the comforts of their own home. While not all of it works and a chunk of it
is derivative fluff we’ve seen in countless films before it, Moon Garden is
truly an arresting experiment, a cinematic petri dish whose chemical reactions
threaten to shatter the dish but remains so visually striking we don’t find
ourselves caring so much when it stumbles.
One of the most promising and wholly original cinematic debuts of the
year, no question!
--Andrew Kotwicki
