Mare’s Nest: Ben Rivers has produced his most hopeful film to date

In a film where nothing is taken literally, the biggest enigma of the picture revolves around its protagonist, Moon (Moon Guo Barker): is she meant to be perceived as a child, or is she a child pretending to be an adult? 

Taking a position on the film’s central mystery determines the kind of experience the viewer will derive from Ben Rivers’ latest offering, a work that simultaneously converses with and diverges from the director’s previous films. 

Like Slow Action (2011) and Look Then Below (2019), Mare’s Nest takes place in a speculative world where history has become futile and superfluous. Moon assumes the role of the guide – a recurring figure in Rivers’ universe – accompanying the viewer on a surreal journey through sparse landscapes that seldom reveal themselves to the prying onlooker. 

Unlike Two Years at Sea (2011) and Bogancloch (2024), Moon is not a resigned dweller reacting to the arrival of intruders: she is a more active and dynamic guide, venturing into the ruins of a fading civilisation – or perhaps the emergence of a new one. 

Rivers, as is his habit, refuses to provide psychological explanations for Moon or the landscapes she traverses. Her expedition may be directionless, but it is not meaningless. By adopting this childlike perspective, Rivers has produced his most hopeful feature to date: a film suggesting that, to see, feel, and absorb this newly refurbished world, one must adopt unknowing eyes.  

Divided into eight chapters, the film’s longest and most dialogue-heavy section sees Rivers adapting Don DeLillo’s one-act play The Word for Snow (2007), in which a pilgrim encounters a scholar and his translator who have chosen to isolate themselves in a remote location following an environmental calamity. 

A philosophical interruption to Moon’s incessant wandering, the lengthy conversation – which evokes Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialism – casts language as a relic of a dying civilisation: a memento mori for an archaic form of knowledge rendered ineffectual by both history and the evolution of human experience. 

The episodic structure of this relatively linear, if plotless, narrative lends the film a mythical quality, mirrored in Rivers’ expansive landscapes – particularly in the Minotaur-taunting sequence, where a Menorcan quarry is transformed into an otherworldly maze filled with wonder and danger. 

These two contrasting sentiments anchor Moon’s perception of a world suspended between the old and the new. The fundamental nature of her voyage is defined by transience, a notion doubly embodied in Rivers’ use of 16mm film. 

The protagonists of Rivers’ previous films cling to places and lives on the verge of inevitable disappearance, engaged in a perpetual, quixotic struggle against looming change before eventually surrendering to resignation. Moon, by contrast, accepts change; she understands that impermanence is not an enemy to be defeated but an ally to be embraced, because only through ephemerality can renewal emerge. 

Moon, therefore, may be neither an actual child nor a child pretending to be an adult. She is the eye of renewal: liberated from the shackles of collective memory and the weight of heritage; freed from the burden of the past; and, most importantly, released from the vanity of attachment to places, people, and lives that can never truly be preserved.  

► Mare’s Nest is in select UK cinemas now. Find screening details here.