Trauma though a child’s vivid imagination, where memories, joy and fear meld into fantastical, often terrifying, imagery, is the heart of the visually stunning “Moon Garden.”
Writer/director/editor Ryan Stevens Harris creates “real” and surreal worlds where past and present blur for five year-old Emma, played by Haven Lee Harris, delivering an extraordinary performance that anchors the film. Her angelic features and Shirley Temple mop-topped cuteness make the dark and disturbing netherworld she’s required to navigate, screaming, crying and cowering, for most of the film. But there are moments of light in the dark; Emma playing under a bed sheet with her mother quickly changes to a scary scene in which Emma hides beneath a covering; jokes her dad makes about grandpa’s chattering teeth and electrical outages becomes recurring, haunting images.
Emma plunges into this subterranean dystopia after she witnesses an escalating argument between her parents Sara (Augie Duke) and Alex (Brionne Davis). Distraught, Emma slips on her scattered toys and tumbles down the stairs. As paramedics treat her and she’s rushed to the hospital, Emma is already slogging through a steampunk dreamscape, guided by the moon, after she escapes down a well. She can see her frightened parents calling to her as she lies comatose in a hospital bed but she can’t reach them. One of many ghoulish characters she encounters is a “Phantom of the Opera”-like musician (Phillip E. Walker) who plays Emma’s mother’s delicate, haunting lullaby, “Without You,” on harpsichord strings. He gives Emma a transistor radio through which she can hear her parents’ scratchy, distant voices as they try to bring her back to consciousness.
Trying to find her way home, Emma’s memories of her mom and dad tangle with more bizarre and frightening escapades. There’s the ghost of Miss Havisham in the moldy groom (Timothy Lee DePriest) who dances on a table with his bride (Tea Mckay). The special effects, art direction, cinematography and sound design are impressive as “Moon Garden” effectively creates a nightmarish world of childhood innocence and imagination as Emma struggles to return home. It’s “The Wizard of Oz” meets “It” with the visual panache of Tim Burton as Harris takes us on a journey between dual worlds: sleep and wakefulness; childhood and adulthood; darkness and light.
