‘Mare’s Nest’ Locarno Review: Childhood Adventures in a Post-Apocalyptic World

A shift in Ben Rivers’ long career, Mare’s Nest explores not a new physical territory but a different mode of storytelling for the director of Two Years at Sea. While his observational eye and characteristically enigmatic, evocative style remain intact, the film introduces fresh elements to his work: a world inhabited by children, a greater emphasis on dialogue, and something resembling a more structured narrative. These are not radical departures, though — more like subtle detours and open paths that don’t betray his earlier work, much as happened when Lisandro Alonso — a filmmaker with whom Rivers can be compared, and with whom he has been connected — made Jauja, altering his storytelling approach while, in essence, remaining true to it.

The first striking thing here is that the story is led by children — most notably Moon (Moon Guo Barker), a precocious, intelligent, and deeply curious girl moving through a fairytale-like setting in a world where adults seem to be entirely absent. A bit like Where the Wild Things Are — Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s book — the action unfolds in what appears to be a post-apocalyptic universe populated solely, or at least visibly, by children.

Moon’s adventures are elusive and might well exist only in her imagination. At one point, she gathers with other girls her age in a cabin for a long, dense, and intelligent near-philosophical debate adapted from Don DeLillo’s play The Word for Snow. The conversation touches on climate change (perhaps the cause of the film’s apocalyptic undertones), the missteps of language, and other themes that Rivers admits were the direct inspiration for the film itself. This extended scene becomes the axis for Moon’s subsequent wanderings in the story.

Rivers’ cinema has always gravitated toward marginal lives and characters on the fringes of what we call civilization. Here, that tendency reappears, but with children at its center. Mare’s Nest never veers into Lord of the Flies territory — quite the opposite: its characters embody freedom, kindness, and a desire to share adventures and make sense of the world around them. These are endearing yet mysterious figures who never fall into the tics or conventions of professional child actors.

“I wanted to create a world of children with an underlying uncertainty, one that reflected global anxieties but was also, in some way, hopeful. I didn’t want any connection to the adult world, nor any explanation for why,” says the director of Boganchloch in the film’s press notes. And that is precisely the impression one takes away from this visually arresting, enigmatic, and deeply human work by the British filmmaker. Rivers envisions a difficult future here, but from a positive perspective: if the apocalypse is going to take the adults away, that might actually be good news.