In a cinematic landscape where dystopias are so often steeped in hopelessness and fatalism, Mare’s Nest, the latest work by British filmmaker Ben Rivers, offers something rare: a vision of the future that, without denying the shadows, opens the door to imagination, tenderness, and—most importantly—the possibility of reinventing everything. Rivers places us in a world mysteriously devoid of adults. Among ruins and wide-open landscapes, a girl named Moon wanders through uncharted territories, encountering other children who seem to live in a kind of gentle anarchy, where curiosity and play still have room to flourish. There are no concrete explanations of what happened, nor clear clues as to time or place: Rivers prefers to immerse us in this suspended universe, where each encounter is a self-contained chapter, a fragment of a journey that is both outward and inward.

Far from a linear narrative, the film unfolds in eight sections, each introduced by hand-written intertitles penned by Moon herself. This almost artisanal device serves as an emotional compass: each title hints at a tone, a question, or a small revelation—such as in one of the film’s central moments, the adaptation of The Word for Snow, a stage play by Don DeLillo reflecting on climate change, language, and the end of time. Rivers keeps the text almost intact, but places it in the mouths of three child performers. The effect is hypnotic: the lines, laden with repetition and silence, take on a strange, comic rhythm and a touching fragility. Hearing children recite these words about the disappearance of the world as we know it—and about how, when the time comes, we may be left with “the word snow” instead of snow itself—highlights both the clarity and the vulnerability of their gaze.

Yet Mare’s Nest does not linger in dialogue alone. As it progresses, words give way to the visual: images that feel dreamlike, sounds dissolving into echoes and rhythms, spontaneous gestures that speak more than any script. In one chapter, Moon takes part in rituals around a bonfire, wrapped in chants that swell into an almost hallucinatory montage. In another, the narrative breaks to introduce The Minotaur, a previous short film by Rivers shot in an impressive stone labyrinth in Menorca. Within the film’s own logic, this “film within the film” is the children’s own creation, as if artistic expression were their natural language for communicating and making sense of the world they inhabit.

As Rivers has mentioned in interviews, the project’s origin was shaped by the pandemic and by reflections on the loss of freedoms. Even so, Mare’s Nest resists sinking into pessimism. The filmmaker imagined here a scenario where that independence is amplified: a territory without adults, where cooperation and creativity take the place of violence or hierarchy. In this sense, the film is almost the opposite of Lord of the Flies: there is no struggle for power or descent into bloody chaos, but rather an exploration of how life might be if we started anew, guided by innocence and ingenuity.

Mare’s Nest engages with deeply contemporary concerns: ecological collapse, social isolation, the fragility of our political structures. And yet it approaches them from an unusual angle, avoiding both moralizing and despair. The result is the experience of watching children imagine, question, play, and search for meaning in the midst of an uncertain landscape. The film seems to suggest that, while it acknowledges the gravity of our present, it also dares to propose that the future can be rewritten. It is not about seeking quick answers, but about opening new questions and rethinking a future that is too often presented as inevitably bleak. At the very least, it reminds us that alternative futures do exist—and that imagining other paths is, in itself, an act of creativity.