Inland
Once upon a time the child in the red jumper stood alone in the green forest staring at the statue, a carved image of grace; which of them was weeping then, and which is weeping now? Released from hospital following an undisclosed incident, the moment plays in the mind of the man who is unforthcoming in his discharge interview which questions his state of mind, saying only that the feeling he is experiencing is like that before a storm.
Reclaiming his car, he drives to his hometown on the edge of the forest to an awkward but warm welcome from some, while others are hostile, unwilling to forgive the unspoken transgressions he committed against friends and family, and there are no answers about his missing mother Lizzie, the woman who walked into the forest and never emerged, her memory echoing in the words of rhymes warning of fairies in the wood.
Closely resembling It Is In Us All but more tenuously structured, written and directed by Fridtjof Ryder while still at film school Inland is a deeply abstract work set on the cusp of the wild forest and the outskirts of an unnamed town, a border between two incompatible environments where at night the homeless unnamed man (Rory Alexander) parks his car on the hillside and watches the lights below, signifiers of other people going about their lives while he is unable to move forward.
The relationships between the characters never defined, can it be presumed that the man who runs the garage (Don’t Look Up’s Mark Rylance) where the man is offered work is his stepfather? He is straightforward, uncomplicated in his genuine love for the man, but though he speaks in mumbled riddles what little can be discerned indicates he is unconcerned about Lizzie, not considering it out of character for her to simply absent herself if the mood takes her.
A film whose substance is so ethereal as to be open to whatever interpretation is laid upon it, does the dying owl represent the mother he must accept is gone, or is it supposed to represent her more directly, a transformation from human to animal mediated by the powers of the forest which also call to the man whose bones creak like the branches of a trees, barely seen by those around him but wishing to disappear entirely?
The man seemingly caught between two worlds but belonging to neither, he hangs around in car parks with acquaintances including Doctor Who’s Shaun Dingwall and In from the Side’s Alexander Lincoln who take him to The Faerie Queen’s, a strange bar where patrons sit in silence among red curtains before a stage of statues, but told through image rather than dialogue Inland conveys little meaningful other than that the characters feel as lost and empty as the viewer, intruders in a place they do not belong.
Following previews on Wednesday 24th May Inland will be on general release from Friday 16th June
