Mare’s Nest

A child emerges from a crashed car and picks up a turtle to whom no less than the origin of humanity is explained during an extended walk-and-talk set against a gorgeous sunset. This child is Moon, who wanders a post-apocalyptic world conspicuously devoid of adults, a mystery the movie never answers. The latest feature by Ben Rivers (Two Years at Sea) deepens the filmmaker’s longstanding thematic preoccupations (freedom and utopia, alternative existences and imagined futures), at times recalling earlier works like Slow Action and Ah, Liberty! even as it ventures into new realms of narrative exploration. Anchored by newcomer Moon Guo Barker’s magnetic performance, this enigmatic, ever-shifting road movie is also a showcase for Rivers’ awe-inspiring view of the natural world, inhabited by his charismatic young actors across a panoply of sequences—some amusing, some unnerving, and in the case of a stealth Don DeLillo adaptation, both.