Writer and Director: Nicholas Ashe Bateman
There should be a prize for making it to the end of Nicholas Ashe Bateman’s film which is as mystifying and as silly as its title. Set, presumably, in the future after a climate change event where the weather is now always hot and humid, people try to escape the heat on a ship that takes wild horses to a cooler temperate place. The Wanting Mare is as pretentious as it sounds.
Why they take the horses to arctic temperatures is not explained, and it seems fairly unimportant to the main narrative, which instead focuses on people who live in a ruined city near the port. Moira spends her nights listening to a tape of her mother singing in a nightclub before driving back to her house by the sea. One day she comes across a bloody man in a stairwell. She takes him home and cares for him. In return for her hospitality, she asks him to get her a ticket for the boat that takes the horses over the ocean to their new home.
Lawrence agrees to the deal, but instead of giving her the ticket, he gives her a baby that he has found on the shore. The second part of the film is set 34 years later when the baby has grown up and wanders the city with a horse in tow. She meets Hadeon who promises her a ticket. The cycle begins again, but this time with violent results. This could be what is going on. It’s hard to tell.
And it’s hard to care too. There is no joy either in just watching the movie for its images as most scenes appear to be shot through blue or red filters or in the dark where the film becomes grainy. Often scenes are just one second long and the start of the film is a protracted montage. This directorial decision makes the film look like a music video or an extended perfume advert. Montage sequences are usually used to indicate time passing, but here time moves incrementally slow. The film’s 90 minutes feels more like 90 hours.
Battling with a script that is as obtuse as the narrative, the actors try their best and Christine Kellogg-Darrin as the older Moira gives a performance that is worthy of better material. The three male actors spend most of the time with their shirts off, just making sure we understand how hot the climate is in the city, but these bare chests only serve to suggest that The Wanting Mare is an overlong commercial for a cheap aftershave.
Director Nicholas Ashe Bateman freely confesses that he didn’t go to film school and that instead he learnt how to make movies through YouTube tutorials. He also didn’t have much of a budget and most of The Wanting Mare was filmed in front of green screens, so to make up such a dystopian world with so little experience and with such little money is somewhat impressive, but it’s still not worth watching.
The Wanting Mare is available to rent or own on digital HD from Bulldog Film Distribution on 7 February 2022
