Final Rating: 2/5
Mare’s Nest opens with a title scrawled on a blackboard before cutting to a crashed car. A young girl named Moon (played by Moon Guo Barker) exits the car, picks up a turtle she discovers in the road, and begins to ponder aloud where she and the turtle came from. What follows is a nearly 10 minute long take of the girl and the turtle walking while Moon describes the big bang and the origin of life on Earth.
Directed by Ben Rivers, Mare’s Nest centres around Moon as she travels through a world without adults. Playing out as a series of mostly disconnected, distinct episodes, Mare’s Nest explores philosophy, the need to tell stories, and – to a lesser extent – what each means in a young world.
Rivers isn’t the first person to consider what kids might do when adults disappear. That said, the kids in Mare’s Nest are distinguishable from adults not by their rowdiness, but primarily by the free time they seem to have. The people Moon encounters might as well be little philosophers, speaking and behaving like adults, save that none of them are bound by responsibilities to society or families.
One segment – which directly adapts Don DeLillo’s 2007 play The Word for Snow – puts Moon in discussion with a girl identified as a professor, and the girl’s interpreter. Though it plays out with young actors, Rivers’ version of Word keeps lines alluding to the professor’s accomplishments, characters’ professions, and even an allusion to Y2K. The choice of actors recontextualizes the content, but the content itself doesn’t change. “The word becomes the thing,” the professor says several times during the segment, “the word for snow will be the snow.”
The most interesting message in Mare’s Nest is the idea that a world without adults – a world obviously drastically different from our own – still ends up producing things viewers quickly recognize. The best episode of the film – titled Menorca – is presented as a film that Moon is watching. In the film, a minotaur kills a girl and is then chased into a labyrinth to live out his days. Like The Word For Snow, it directly adapts an existing story, but unlike the previous episode, it’s created by people Moon meets.
Not all episodes in Mare’s Nest are created equal. Several episodes quietly follow Moon as she explores the world. Moon’s world, the forests, the caves, are pretty, but hardly as interesting on its own as the people that inhabit it. Rivers’ experiments with different shooting styles and film stocks keep Mare’s Nest visually appealing, but can only be appreciated for so long before they start to wear thin.
Ultimately, that’s the biggest weakness of Mare’s Nest. Rivers has intriguing ideas, some of which he’s able to explore in interesting ways, but not enough to fill 98 minutes.
Mare’s Nest was seen during the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Thank you to Rediance Films for the screener.
