For all that science has taught humanity about the world around us, there remains so much that it has yet to teach us about the world within ourselves. Writer-director Tara Mieler’s romantic drama Wander Darkly plunges us into this conundrum, but it more often than not just circles it. Indeed, the problems that Miele poses throughout are too simplistic to need much straightening out. This is a resolutely straightforward film masquerading as a mystery, and there’s precious little mystery to find in it.
Miele’s conceit involves the manifestation of physical trauma as emotional trauma. Adrienne (Sienna Miller) is involved in a car accident, after which the new mother experiences a series of disorienting episodes that convince her that her injuries were fatal. She believes her continued presence in the physical realm is, effectively, as a ghost, and it’s up to her partner, Matteo (Diego Luna), to convince her otherwise. The film, though, is cagey about the reality of Adrienne’s situation: As the couple sifts through memories of their life together, purportedly as some kind of therapy through which they’ll resolve her current mental crises, Miele simply goes about trying to make a would-be tragic romantic tale as needlessly unwieldy as possible.
The novelty of Wander Darkly is vapid and spurious, as the cutesy, pop-surrealist psychological wanderings of Adrienne and Matteo are but window dressing for a love story defined more by anguish than affection, concerned more with soapy expressions of winsome passions and torments than with using its structure to any innovative end. There’s a meet-cute at a rooftop party, a nostalgic embrace on a beach, a bitter argument at an outdoor art installation, and a lingering sense that the film might have been a cult favorite circa 2011.
Wander Darkly only succeeds insofar as you’re willing to give in to Miller and Luna’s performances. Their commitment to their parts is admirable, not least because of the tiresome familiarity of these characters and their various melodramas. Miele makes it unreasonably hard for her actors, with line after risible line of dialogue that would weigh down a Mills & Boon novel, though Miller in particular is impressively sincere as Adrienne. She’s rarely been so magnetic as she is here, projecting the wide range of extreme emotions demanded of her with a vibrant naturalism. Barely a moment passes without her presence, and she often conveys Adrienne’s trauma with an emotional heft that largely eludes the film.
Dotted throughout Wander Darkly are odd, incongruous genre elements that yield questionable results, and the scale of the payoff for all of the film’s misplaced creative ambition will depend wholly on one’s gullibility. Miele has a card or two lodged loosely up her sleeve until the final act, in plain sight if you look closely enough, and it isn’t until the final 10 minutes, after so many narrative and conceptual maneuvers have been dealt with, that we’re even allowed to appreciate it. There are hints of a profound study of grief and psychological trauma in Wander Darkly, but they’re only ever hints, as Miele dedicates herself above all else to slicing it up and diluting it with needless structural and stylistic obfuscation.
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