111 min | PG-13 | February 28, 2020 | Searchlight Pictures
A poor Louisiana boy hops a freight train to an island where children never grow old and never grow up. Benh Zeitlin remakes Peter Pan as a barefoot ode to feral youth. The ambition outruns the result.
Wendy Darling lives above her mother’s railside diner in the Louisiana bayou. One night she and her twin brothers chase a wild boy onto a passing freight train and follow him to a volcanic island. There the children run loose and never age, kept young by a glowing creature in the sea they call Mother. The film reimagines Peter Pan as a fable about the terror of growing up and the cost of refusing to. Benh Zeitlin builds the whole movie around a single idea. Belief keeps you young, and doubt makes you old.
Devin France plays Wendy with a wide-eyed stubbornness that anchors the chaos around her. She watches the other children with the dawning awareness that the magic has rules and the rules are cruel. Yashua Mack plays Peter as a small barefoot whirlwind who shouts and laughs and never sits still. He is pure id, and Mack commits to it completely. The child actors improvise much of their dialogue, and the looseness reads as authentic in the play scenes and as shapeless in the moments that need weight.
Zeitlin directs from a script he wrote with his sister Eliza Zeitlin, and the handmade texture defines the film. Cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grovlen shoots low and close to the ground, putting the camera at child height so the adults and the volcano both loom. The score by Dan Romer and Zeitlin swells constantly, pushing every scene toward awe whether the scene earns it or not. Production design favors driftwood, rope, and real volcanic rock over digital construction. The result looks alive and feels exhausting because the movie never modulates its intensity.
The film mistakes momentum for momentum’s purpose. Zeitlin keeps the children running and screaming for so long that the emotional turns stop landing. The Peter Pan source material carries a built-in melancholy about lost time, and Wendy reaches for that melancholy without building the structure to hold it. There is a real vision here and a real refusal to shape it into a story. The energy is genuine. The film does not know what to do with it.