A still from The Wanting Mare. (Photo: Gravitas Ventures)
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Everything I’d read about
The Wanting Mare had me excited. Writer-director Nicholas Ashe Bateman spent five years making the film in a Patterson, NJ warehouse, doing many of the visual effects himself, envisioning it as the first in a full franchise exploring a vast new world. After watching the trailer, it became obvious that
The Wanting Mare Review: A Visually Transporting Fable With a Stubbornly Opaque Story The Wanting Mare Review: A Visually Transporting Fable With a Stubbornly Opaque Story
Nicholas Ashe Bateman s directing debut is a triumph of dystopian world-building as three generations of women share the same dream of the world before.
Mark Keizer, provided by
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Running time: Running time: 89 MIN.
The explanatory text that opens “The Wanting Mare,” Nicholas Ashe Bateman’s ambitious, epoch-spanning directing debut, informs us that in the city of Whithren, citizens are desperate to escape by booking passage on the once-a-year transport ship that carries wild horses to the wintry promised land of Levithen. These words, a fantasist’s delight, only barely set the table for what’s to come, a visually enthralling but elliptical and withholding quasi post-apocalyptic drama about three generations of Whithren women who carry with them the burdensome memories of �
What’s new to VOD and streaming this weekend
Including reviews of A Glitch In The Matrix, Falling, Malcolm & Marie, Rams and Greenland By Norman Wilner
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OW critics pick what’s new to streaming and VOD for the weekend of February 5. Plus: Everything new to VOD and streaming platforms.
Falling
(Viggo Mortensen)
Mortensen’s first feature as a writer/director finds the actor shaping a simple father-son story into a powerful meditation on compassion at any cost. It’s not perfect, but it’s powerful. Mortensen plays John, a gay man who’s taken a week off to bring his ailing father Willis (Lance Henriksen) out west from his rural New York farm. Willis is suffering from dementia and rapidly deteriorating, and John is looking to make things easier on the old man – but Willis’s illness has only amplified the fury, misogyny and homophobia that drove his family away decades earlier. Falling is rough in the way that first films can be, but even when something doesn
It’s hard to find a word that best describes the genre-defying “The Wanting Mare,” except for maybe “impressive.” Not quite science-fiction at least not in any conventionally pulpy way this arty post-apocalyptic mood piece is mostly a triumph of DIY persistence for the writer-director Nicholas Ashe Bateman, who reportedly spent five years working on the digital effects to make a sparse set look like an entire ruined world.
Bateman only hints at where and when we are. We’re told at the start that in the land of Anmaere, there’s a swelteringly hot, crime-ridden city called Whithren, where once a year an enormous cargo ship sends some of the local wild horses across the water to a much colder and apparently less dangerous continent. Residents of Whithren spend much of their time trying to figure out a way to sail away.