Review: ‘The Wanting Mare’ is an exquisite storytelling feat

Where a film like last summer’s She Dies Tomorrow detonates with death’s ticking time bomb, The Wanting Mare theorizes that this is all there is. Both are rife with existentialism, adorned with hyper-stylized storytelling, plush color palettes, and an infinity that seems to burn the skin. In his directorial debut, Nicholas Ashe Bateman builds an illustrious, mostly digital, world around themes of time, aging, and stagnation — and what emerges is one of the most ambitious and challenging films of the last 20 years. The Wanting Mare bares resemblances to familiar post-apocalyptic epics, yet its unwavering gaze upon the human condition through such dreamy cinema elevates it far beyond the standard fair.

The film follows a young woman named Moira (Jordan Monaghan), born into a foreign land of great ruin and sadness. Long gone are the days of normalized civilization, and the people in the city of Whithren instead live constantly on the brink of collapse, scavenging to stay alive and killing when they must. Moira’s mother died immediately after childbirth, and the last remaining link to her heritage is a recurring dream, an agonizing vessel containing both the sheer power and pulverizing weight of womanhood. When Moira saves a man named Lawrence (Bateman), tending to his near-fatal wounds, she learns what it means to love, to hope, and most importantly, to feel truly alive in a cold, unfeeling world.

But life is never exactly as one first imagines it. Love fades; petals turn brown and tumble apart; and our mortal coils melt back into the earth. Whithren operates in a similar way, fashioning its shimmering outer coat with rivets of suffering, loneliness, and inescapable dread. It’s no coincidence that such commonplace misery is stitched so delicately against a synthetic backdrop, allowing Moira, Lawrence, and a smorgasbord of other tortured characters — including Moira’s adopted daughter Eirah (Yasamin Keshtkar) — to ground such a dazzling universe in simple human truths.

A mysterious cargo ship docks in the nearby harbor once a year, and the people of Whithren scramble to find a coveted ticket for passage from this land to the next. It’s a futile sort of existence, a semblance of our own wherein we constantly race onward to the next goal, only to discover we are never quite satisfied. That deceptively hopeful state of being appears as nothing more than a mirage, and any forward progress is actually quite impossible.

Through various flash-forwards, often leaping decades, The Wanting Mare pressurizes the inevitable downturn of human existence — ambitions, promises, and hunger for life itself always seem to vanish eventually, leaving behind nothing more than a carcass. “Am I ever going to see you again?” a much older Moira (Christine Kellogg-Darrin) asks her lover Lawrence, once he returns decades later. Lawrence’s face is weary, etched with so much pain only the world could inflict. “Never,” he responds, a sorrowful resignation lacing his lips. Moira accepts his answer, resolving herself to a quiet life with her daughter (Maxine Muster) in a cliff-side farmhouse.

The Wanting Mare captures every possible shade of life as we know it, from immense trauma to unbridled joy and romance. It’s all so terribly fleeting, and the best we can make of it, as filmmaker Nicholas Ashe Bateman suggests, is to cherish each second of it while we can.

The Wanting Mare hits digital and select theatres Friday (February 5).

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