Wander Darkly (2020)
Directed by Tara Miele
New parents Adrienne and Matteo are forced to reckon with trauma amidst their troubled relationship. They must revisit the memories of their past and unravel haunting truths in order to face their uncertain future.
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What critics compared Wander Darkly to
In these reminisces, “Wander Darkly” sometimes inhabits a YA melodramatic vibe—each emotional swing swells to a critical mass—mixed with an “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” dynamic.
Providing a sort of out of body experience for its lead characters akin to films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind may have some pining for a sense of levity or oddness courtesy of a director like Michel Gondry, but I admire the way Miele takes serious subject matter and doesn’t let viewers off easy.
The better of the two is Tara Miele’s ambitious “Wander Darkly,” a film that echoes one of my favorite movies of the modern era, Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
As in so many of the death-after-life or memory-centric films it lightly references — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , It's a Wonderful Life , Heaven Can Wait , to name but a few — there's arguably too much emphasis on neat patterns, seemingly throwaway details that turn out to have major payoffs later on.
The obvious mile marker here would be the relationship deconstruction of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but it's more a post-mumblecore What Dreams May Come, a mix of agnostic afterlife fantasy and hand-held camerawork.
The film was undoubtedly influenced by the superior Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”.
The apparent influences on Tara Miele’s “Wander Darkly” are easy to spot, from obvious and immediate forbearers that range from Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “The Science of Sleep,” to shlockier fare like “Stay” and “Ghost.”
Miele plays loose with the reality of their predicament, and what starts out resembling Eternal Sunshine begins to take the shape of similar psychological explorations, from Inception to The Science of Sleep.