Rating: NR | Runtime: 97 minutes
Release Date: May 19th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Oscilloscope Laboratories
Director(s): Ryan Stevens Harris
Writer(s): Ryan Stevens Harris

You have to find a way out of the dark.

In great DIY fashion over three-plus years with his daughter as the lead and one hundred thousand feet of expired 35mm film stock at his disposal, Ryan Stevens Harris’ Moon Garden was born. The dark fantasy unfolds through the imaginatively comatose mind of a young girl named Emma (Haven Lee Harris), desperate to escape the escalating turmoil at home courtesy of her parents’ fracturing marriage.

Happy memories mix with sad inside her dreams as Mom (Augie Duke’s Sara) and Dad’s (Brionne Davis’ Alex) voices can be heard on a faltering transistor radio, reality placing the couple near their unconscious child’s hospital bed after a fall sparked by their latest quarrel. They plead for her to come back as Emma does everything possible to comply despite a monster born from bad feelings (Morgana Ignis’s Teeth) stalking behind, lapping up her fallen tears.

Think a sinister Alice in Wonderland by way of A Monster Calls where grief and frustration are weighing young Emma down to the point where her body realizes that waking up may be too dangerous a proposition. Odd characters arrive for nightmarish dinner parties (Timothy Lee DePriest’s Groom) and blood-drenched nursery rhymes (told by Emily Meister), their weaknesses born from the good times of years past when Mom and Dad weren’t constantly blaming each other for their own unhappiness.

It becomes a war of attrition in some regards as Emma learns to recognize that there was enough good to cancel out the bad even if none of it has ever been hers to shoulder. Not that blame has ever stopped a child from believing he/she was the problem nor parents from thinking a child could be the answer to theirs.

I’d love to see a different version this film delving deeper into that truth. As it is now, Moon Garden (despite its sometimes-terrifying visuals) is a kid’s movie that wears its earnest desire for happily ever after on its sleeve. By putting Emma in the lead, it takes the onus off Sara and Alex by positing a tragedy such as losing their only child could magically fix everything that’s wrong with their relationship.

All those months where they refused to truly listen to each other erased because of a shared love even though those good memories (pre-beard for Alex) reveal that adoring Emma failed to prove enough once already. Perhaps this says more about me than the film, but I found a lot of it to be as hollow as the main villain (a nicely conceived metaphor by Harris) since nothing Emma does within her mind can truly fix anything. We’re instead watching a little girl torture herself at the hands of two self-involved adults in woeful need of therapy.

This is why I think A Monster Calls is such a fantastic film. The horrors its lead must endure are outside of his control too, but he’s augmented them by denial. He’s the reason they’ve become so insurmountably potent. That’s not the case here since Emma is too young to even fully grasp what’s happening beyond the purely emotional intuition that something is very, very wrong. Her adventure is thus less about catharsis than it is about acceptance. Rather than running away from or fighting back against her monsters, the lesson here is to admit that they can’t actually hurt her.

Translating that to the real world is wonky since it says that her parents (the monsters causing her so much strife now) can’t either. That only tells me they already have. They’ve caused her so much pain that she’s become numb to their chaos. So, while visually gorgeous in its commendable, if incomplete, message about the power of “healing”, the smiles at the end feel more like resignation to me.

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Haven Lee Harris and Morgana Ignis in MOON GARDEN; courtesy of Oscilloscope.