Longing lasts forever. Even if we are not sure why we want what we want, we recognize the constant absence, like the air between the fingers of an outstretched hand, straining towards the unreachable. In the world of Anmaere, in the molten city of Whithren, the destination is Levithen, a place that no one has seen but everyone knows. Whithren is trapped in a constant sweaty summer, decaying like fruit left in the sun, and the only escape is frozen Levithen. The only route is a ticket on a boat that carries the wild horses of Whithren on the Trans-Midwin passage.
Filmed on a New Jersey soundstage and painstakingly filled out in post-production, the world of The Wanting Mare is an utterly unique low SF future. Whithren is a febrile seaside city, a transposed nowhere, a Mediterranean coastal port with an ancient seawall (ancient by whatever future time this is) wedged in between New England cliffs. This is where three generations of women spend their lives intertwined with the rarely-seen horses, dancing in volatility with the idea of staying or going, of committing versus dwelling in a state of disconnection. In Anmaere, we are all waiting on our ticket across the Midwin, unsure of our future, weighed down by our now.
The story is not intergenerational, but told across generations, and mostly through the eyes of Moira (Nutt as a child, Monaghan as an adult, and Kellogg-Darrin in her rueful old age). Yet she is not the protagonist, as such definitive action would be against the spirit and nature of writer-director Bateman’s deliberately elusive narrative. Over the years, the paths of Moira and her daughters intersect, as they do with the mythos of Anmaere that Bateman has promised to extend and examine in future films. They are dreamers, passing a shared, unreachable dream for which they perpetually ache.
Not that everyone is inactive. Violence intrudes, sometimes directly, sometime peripherally, always through the intervention of men who are either as victims or perpetrators (often a mixture of both). Yet they are not villainous: instead, they are trapped in their own indecision, chasing the tickets, never using them. An enigmatic narration by Kate Lyn Sheil both illuminates and obfuscates a story that is more instinctual than explanatory. Bateman’s worldbuilding introduces stranger elements that are always counterbalanced by more grounded emotional developments, keeping the audience engaged as hard as the esoteric mythology pushes them away. In that delicate balance it bypasses the logical parts of the brain and speaks purely in quiet emotional truths.
This article appears in February 12 • 2021.
