‘Moon Garden’ Review: Malice in Wonderland

“Moon Garden” is a nightmare tour by way of a small baby’s psyche that the filmmaker Ryan Stevens Harris may have staged as an escape room, or a haunted home, or a themed restaurant the place his creepy puppets and bizarro performers would chatter their enamel at you whereas smashing plates. It feels as if he selected to make a film just because that’s the best solution to get his ghastly creations seen.

Harris appears bored by his movie’s opening sequence, a chintzy melodrama a few woman named Emma (his personal daughter Haven Lee Harris, simply 4-years-old when she began the mission) and her depressing dad and mom (Brionne Davis and Augie Duke). Only after Emma’s circumstances worsen — the poor expensive is knocked comatose — do issues onscreen enhance.

Heroines have been tumbling into their very own unconscious since “The Wizard of Oz” and “Alice in Wonderland.” Rarely are the youngsters this younger — and their adventures this darkish. The moppet fees by way of all kinds of muck with kittenish braveness as Harris unleashes a military of unnerving sensible results: cease movement tear-gobbling monsters, disconcerting reversed footage, time lapses of rotting fruit, skin-crawling sound design. Initially, we’re repelled by the ’90s grunge video aesthetics. Later, we admire the ability in these visceral expressions of traumas Emma will sometime inform her therapist.

As the tot struggles to brush up the wreckage of a rampaging bride and groom, we sense she already is aware of she’s the household fixer. The movie doesn’t want three lullaby covers of the Badfinger ballad “Without You” when it has the poetry of Harris’s emotional insights, significantly the road: “I wish I had learned that the world was bigger than how I felt.”

Moon Garden
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters.