© Ben Rivers
Ben Rivers’ Mare’s Nest is a thought-provoking and deeply imaginative post-apocalyptic eco-film that dares to put the future of humanity entirely in the hands of children. Featuring a cast composed exclusively of child actors, the film follows Moon Guo Barker, in an impressive performance as the character Moon, through a series of interconnected vignettes that meditate on memory, survival, and the persistence of culture after collapse.
Directed by: Ben Rivers
Year: 2025
Country: United Kingdom, France, Canada
Length: 98 minutes
The opening sequence of the film sets the tone for a patient and philosophical style. Moon crashes her car into a tree, but instead of panic or despair, she emerges and calmly approaches a turtle. In an unbroken shot, she teaches the turtle about the evolution of the human species, as though passing on wisdom to another creature destined to outlive us. This blend of innocence, pedagogy, and absurdity immediately establishes Rivers’ approach of a film that moves slowly, but with ideas so dense that every scene begs to be unpacked.
Perhaps the most striking vignette adapts Don DeLillo’s The Word for Snow, shot in striking black and white. Here, Moon has a discussion with a scholar and a translator years before the main events. The dialogue plays with language itself, as though all three speak the same tongue, the translator repeats every phrase, amplifying its alienated, ritualistic quality. The scholar insists there is nothing left to teach. Words, once attached to objects, now float free in a world where the objects linked to them no longer exist. This meditation on language and loss is both eerie and captivating, turning communication itself into a kind of ruin.
Other segments broaden the scope of Moon’s journey in this novel society. She encounters a community that has devised new rituals and collective practices. She listens to music, takes part in games, and watches a cinematic retelling of the Minotaur myth, a stunning sequence that showcases Rivers’ inventive use of cinematic language to reimagine an ancient story for a new culture. Later, she visits a museum, with adults from the past being showcased. Instead of wisdom, however, the adults display cruelty, the fear and agony on their faces contrasting with the children’s tentative creation of new ways of living. Moon leaves unimpressed, as though signaling that the future lies not in nostalgia and old systems but in reinvention.
Though its pace is slow and its 98 minutes demand concentration, Mare’s Nest rewards attentive viewers with a wealth of layered ideas. Every vignette interrogates what survives catastrophe: Do we remember the past through words? Through ritual, music, or cinema? Will communities, myths, and games outlast the systems that failed us? Rivers presents a range of possibilities, each refracted through the perspective of children who carry a sense of hope.
Ultimately, Mare’s Nest refuses despair we often witness in films that deal with disaster. While the world it depicts is ravaged, it suggests that children might build new, better systems, less burdened by capitalism, more oriented toward collectivity, care, and imagination. By entrusting his vision to child performers, Rivers frames the apocalypse as a possible beginning, a chance to rebuild life and meaning from the ground up.
Because of its intense philosophical dialogue, Mare’s Nest is not an easy film to digest, but it is a profoundly rewarding one in its lyrical, unsettling, and hopeful meditation on how we might remember, reinvent, and persist.
Mare’s Nest premiered at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival as part of the festival’s International Competition.
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