You ever have one of those films?

If Moon Garden had come out this year it would immediately be my top pick for best film of 2024. The product of Ryan Stevens Harris who you may know from his work on Every Dream is a Child with Teeth, Moon Garden has both a fantastical and grim premise. A five year old girl Emma (Haven Lee Harris) falls into a coma after a terrible accident at home. Her mother Sara (Augie Duke) and father Alex (Brionne Davis) are constantly fighting with each other.

As Emma travels through the dream land of her coma, she is stalked by a creature called Teeth (Morgana Ignis), a monster with chattering teeth who seems to feed off her fears and her sorrow. The dreams are interspersed with happy memories of her with her parents, generally bringing some lesson that she can use to keep her moving. All the while she meets interesting people like the Musician (Phillip E. Walker), the Princess (Maria Olsen), and the Groom (Timothy Lee DePriest).

I knew I recognized Maria Olsen somewhere, as she plays Mrs. Dodds in the Percy Jackson movie. Timothy Lee DePriest played Walter in Westworld.

Moon Garden is an utterly gorgeous movie, and the whole time I was thinking about Mad God. If the movie was made to be child-friendly of course. It’s an incredibly surreal film that goes more toward psychological horror than pure spoopies. This is of course the mind of a five year old girl, there’s not a whole lot of deep metaphors to be found here. But the film is interlaced with amazing sets, beautiful visuals, and entrancing characters and set pieces.

All the while Emma’s unconscious mind absorbs what is going on around her, integrating the doctors and the tube and the surgeries to her dream world. It’s visually evocative without being gruesome. At the same time it feels in some parts that the director went out of his way to make sure the audience is aware that the young actress herself was never in any danger while filming this. And of course in the movie itself it holds the context that it is all in her mind. Can Emma make it to wherever she needs to go to reach out to her parents and come back to the world of the living?

God I hope so, this isn’t that kind of movie.

Fair warning; you’re going to cry a couple times at this film. If you have kids, you might just want to buy a whole new box of Kleenex before diving in. Haven Lee Harris is shockingly talented at her role, although it’s likely because the film called for a kid acting like a kid. The other actors in the film play their roles quite well. They feel like characters out of a fairy tale, and in some cases literally are. I never quite understood the origins of Teeth as a character manifesting in Emma’s mind.

The fact that Emma is a five year old paves the way for the story being quite slim overall. After all this isn’t like 1408 where John Cusack’s character has a whole life of regrets to torment him. This is a little girl who knows about fairy tales and that time at the beach and climbing a tree and her parents fighting each other a lot. It’s all scored and woven with music that will rip your heart out.

Moon Garden is a beautifully crafted film and at an hour and a half completely digestible. I’ll go even further and say this is a film that I watched on digital and will be buying on physical disc to add to my collection.

Rating: A+