I understand the knee-jerk comparisons to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but it’s mostly superficial. Wander Darkly is a dreamlike allegory about grief and trauma and how that experience is uniquely packaged for each of us.
When a car accident sends a young mother into a fractured reality, she’s left to navigate a myriad of emotions in the space between life and death. That doesn’t sound like Eternal Sunshine to me.
In watching it, you can feel how personal the narrative is. Writer/Director Tara Miele actually did survive a car crash and drew from that experience to build out this existential voyage. There’s an intensity to the intimacy present in the screenplay that resonated strongly with me. The cyclical dredging of the couple’s relationship history, farming the good and the bad, felt honest in a way that both gave them credit and accountability. The portraits of these characters are painted mostly as a couple, without as much depth to them as individuals, but there’s enough there to make it work on the proper emotional levels.
I would love to read the original script for this film because I found the sequencing to be mesmerizing as the setting and the timeline is continuously in a state of fluid shift. Just blocking it all out must have been a challenge but Carolina Costa’s cinematography is an excellent blend of form and function that allowed Tamara Meem and Alex O’Flinn to stitch everything together in the editing room. The visual presentation of the ethereal space is such a big part of the film’s spirit and they deserve a lot of credit for putting it together so elegantly. Alex Weston’s beautiful original score is also crucial to capturing a wealth of emotion and imagination.
A big part of the buzz for this movie was coming from the lead performances. Sienna Miller and Diego Luna both give excellent, nuanced performances. Their chemistry as a couple isn’t quite where you’d want it to be but they are both more than good enough to bridge the gap for the audience and you still feel for them as individuals. It’s a big piece of the puzzle in a film that’s so narrowly focused on the two of them.
I can see why Wander Darkly is getting compared to Eternal Sunshine because they both occupy some of the same emotional realms in regards to the personal relationships they put forth and the visual presentation of metaphysical space, but the former is an expression of internal mechanisms of the spirit while the latter examines the power of memory in the scope of science fiction. There’s room for them both to exist as neighbors without cheapening either.
Recommendation: See it for its stylistic approach to the narrative that stands out as much as, if not more than, the performances.