Long before they came to designate a state of hopeless confusion, the words “mare’s nest” once meant something more electrifying: the excitement for that which doesn’t exist. That’s a good way of thinking about the cinema of Ben Rivers. Perched at the interstice between utopias and dystopias, his films unfurl across sequestered spaces populated by solitary drifters who’ve long abandoned the comforts of 21st-century life. In The Origin of the Species, an old hermit living in the woods of Inverness-shire muses on Darwin’s theories from the confines of his isolated house. Shuttling us from the Polynesian island of Tuvalu to Rivers’s native turf of Somerset, England, Slow Action repurposes these far-flung locales as futuristic civilizations, while Bogancloch caps a trilogy centered on a Scottish musician who’s set camp in a remote corner of Aberdeenshire. It can be difficult to tell whether Rivers’ characters have willfully abandoned modernity or survived the Armageddon, if the world beyond their secluded homes is still functioning or has long been ravaged. But even at its most apocalyptic, his cinema is never dour. Emanating from it is a childlike wonder for these uncharted lands and their residents; at best, the excitement is contagious.
So it is for Mare’s Nest, a film that fully lives up to the more ancient, rejuvenating meaning of its title. Set in a world where adults have disappeared and buildings have turned to rubble, Rivers’s latest follows Moon (Moon Guo Barker), a young girl who roams the barren, grown-ups-free expanse on a growingly surreal journey. What happened, when, or why are questions Rivers isn’t concerned with, and to peg Mare’s Nest as a road movie would be all too simplistic; Moon’s path isn’t linear so much as elliptical, open to digressions and extraneous voices. Written by Rivers, the film stretches across eight chapters, one for each of the girl’s encounters, the longest of which sees the filmmaker adapt Don DeLillo’s 2007 one-act play The Word for Snow. Similarly haunted by a looming cataclysm, the play stages a conversation between a scholar who’s abandoned his work and retreated to a mountain, a pilgrim who’s come to seek his wisdom, and an interpreter mediating between their different languages. In Rivers’s take, the three roles are played by children (with Moon as the pilgrim) wrestling with the end of the world and how to meaningfully speak about it. There’s no denying the exchange’s loopy, circuitous nature––the repartee teems with repetitions, non sequiturs, sentences that float, unfinished, like dying embers. But that alienating quality is in keeping with the source text as well as Mare’s Nest’s own approach to language.
This isn’t just a rare example of a film doing justice to a DeLillo text. (Having kids deliver their lines with utmost seriousness captures the comic solemnity of his dialogues in a way Noah Baumbach’s White Noise never quite managed.) It is also a scene that exemplifies Rivers’ stance toward words and their twinned ability to reveal and obfuscate. Difficult as it may be to find the right ones to describe the catastrophe to come, the scholar prophesies that one day we will only have words, and as the planet breaks down they will effectively replace the objects they describe: children won’t be playing with snow but “with the word for it.” You can read Mare’s Nest’s talky first half as accommodating that suggestion. Slowly, however, the film sheds verbiage for something more elusive, wherein narrative becomes ethereal and words all but superfluous. It’s no wonder Rivers should name one of Mare’s Nest’s late chapters after his 2007 Ah, Liberty! A monochrome snapshot of life in an unnamed, snowcapped land featuring kids playing around mounds of debris, that short contains a line that echoes as a mission statement: “Liberty is the absence of ideas […] Feelings, impressions––that’s the real life.”
You don’t need to be fluent in Rivers’ cinema to register how this shift plays out in Mare’s Nest. By the time Moon starts dancing with a few others around a campfire (“Moon joins some local rituals,” her fourth stop), the film slips into a hallucinatory fantasy, a feeling evoked by its images as much as its soundscapes, in which ominous chants give way to more frenetic jazzy beats. It’s here that Rivers crafts his most entrancing segment, leaving Moon behind to turn to a film within the film, in which a group of kids torment a Minotaur in the labyrinth of a Menorcan quarry. (Shot in the Balearic Islands, North Wales, and continental Spain, Mare’s Nest seamlessly toggles between them, stoking the feeling that Moon is traversing a world that isn’t just spectrally empty but also entirely, bracingly new.) It’s the first segment that introduces a modicum of conflict in what had unspooled as a gentle, lilting fable, and that tension gradually seeps into the film’s fabric. Past this juncture, the images Rivers and co-cinematographer Carmen Pellon capture become more unstable, prone to glitches and marks and flares––a decaying aesthetic to dovetail with a world in tatters.
This too is in keeping with the rest of Rivers’s oeuvre. There is a fragility to his films––shot on celluloid and hand-processed––that can make them like handling ancient relics, works that threaten to break down as you watch. But that perishability accounts for their extraordinary vitality. With its emphasis on people and places seemingly existing outside of History, Rivers’s cinema doesn’t just illuminate alternative lifestyles, but an alternative way of thinking about the medium and its ability to conjure something Moon and Mare’s Nest both radiate: an inordinate curiosity for the unknown.
Mare’s Nest premiered at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival.