A strange and alluring film, Agusti Villaronga's Moon Child brings stylish exuberance and brooding atmospherics to its supernatural narrative designs with great results, early on. The plight of a young telekinetic child who finds himself adopted by a shadowy cult with ambiguous intentions, the opening act of Moon Child exudes intrigue and mystery, soon evolving into a prophetic archetype, one which unfortunately features a bit of the ole white savior motif. The general conceit combined with Villaronga's precise direction was extremely welcome to me at first - knowing nothing about this film going in and being quite found of Depalma's underrated The Fury - yet Moon Child fails where that film succeeds, struggling to maintain sustain itself over its two-hour running time. Being unsettled about what exactly is the root of the problem with Moon Child's back half, it feels rooted in self-indulgence, as the first half of the film's ambiguous nature and aesthetic precision become displaced in the second half, a displacement in which the film's engaging take on a somewhat familiar archetypal story vanishes. When the film's prophetic formalism takes control in the back half, Moon Child is stripped of its ambiguity which hurts the film significantly, playing out the tedious motions of its narrative designs while removing what makes the film quite transfixing in its first act - a foreboding sense of intrigue and the potential for a multitude of thematic readings which are waiting to be uncovered by those viewers who wish to look for a deeper meaning. Early on, I questioned if the film was a commentary about the heinous nature of eugenics, scientism, or central planning; this shadowy cult engaging in social engineering, hiding behind the veil of "science"! Yet again, once the film gets into its back-half prophetic narrative it becomes formulaic and less appealing which is unfortunate given the skill of the filmmakers involved.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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