It’s hard to really describe director Ryan Stevens Harris’s Moon Garden. It’s a movie that’s both incredibly familiar and surprisingly revelatory. Shot on expired 35mm film, its visuals instantly draw you in to the troubled world of Emma (Haven Lee Harris) and her parents Sara (Augie Duke) and Alex (Brionne Davis). But what starts off as a kaleidoscopic adventure into the imagination of a young girl soon starts to feel bloated with over-the-top visual effects that never offer up much more than novelty.
Moon Garden vacillates somewhere between horror and fantasy. It’s as if Dave McKean’s MirrorMask merged with the theatricality of a Rob Zombie film and a dash of Dario Argento-inspired lighting. When Emma accidentally falls into a coma after witnessing her parents arguing, she slips into a dream land of her own creation that’s colorful and cool one minute and horrifically creepy the next.
If you can recall your own childhood, then you know the unique terror a child’s mind is capable of conjuring up late at night when everyone is asleep. Harris captures this youthful fear perfectly, and what’s so remarkable about Moon Garden is the way he manages to mingle the real and imagined fears of a child into one space on screen. Emma’s unconscious mind is deeply influenced by her waking hours — she’s constantly drawing on advice her parents have given her in their daily interactions — and everything she sees as she tries to navigate her way back to the living has a direct connection to something she’s actually experienced. Even the villain, a creepy Rorschach-esque figure that possesses a pair of delightfully disgusting chattering teeth has its roots in a silly tale Emma’s father thought up to explain away a scary noise she hears one night.
But while Emma’s mind is the perfect place to get creative with special effects, after about 45 minutes of watching strange, hallucinatory imagery with very minimal dialogue, you might start to feel like you’re trapped in some kind of bizzarro music video from the ‘90s that simply will not let you turn off the TV. The film’s storyline is abysmally thin. Emma’s parents are clearly well on their way to divorce court even if they refuse to acknowledge it, and their inability to communicate with each other is directly tied to their daughter’s accident. Their daughter loves both her parents and wonders why those two crazy kids can’t just get along, hoping that someday they can all live happily ever after (she’s clearly never watched Marriage Story) as she struggles to regain consciousness. And that’s it. That’s the movie. Sure, I guess you could say it’s some kind of poetic coming-of-age story in which a child’s imagination must reckon with her lived reality, but the movie simply looks cool for a while and then ends. Not to mention the fact that both of this girl’s parents are utterly insufferable people. Her dad just wants to come home from long days “providing for this family” to work on his — honest to God — novel, and her mother absolutely refuses to let any doctor or paramedic do anything to her daughter that might, you know, help her live.
Ultimately, the film’s unwillingness to commit to any hard hitting dialogue and character development keeps it from rising above the level of your basic quirky arthouse film. Some may find Harris’ visual flair alone worthy of high praise, but the director fails to let the story blossom into something more substantial. Full moons sure are pretty to look at, but it’s the sun that actually makes things grow.
Photo courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories
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