A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness - Film Review

Starting with five minutes of silence and ending with a 35-minute heavy metal concert, Ben Rivers and Ben Russell’s experimental feature explores the concept of utopia: both natural and man-made. Visually, the filmmakers achieve a sense of Eden-like contemplation, as stunning twilight lakes lie flat and serene, craggy cliffs allow meditative wanderers to literally and metaphorically reach higher plains; and closely-shot concerts see musicians and audiences alike achieve a condition of transcendental euphoria.
Whether the audience can make sense of what is happening is another question. The film sees an unnamed traveller (musician Robert A.A. Lowe) on a triptych of unique journeys, starting with a sojourn at an Estonian commune. Shot in a documentary style, the members discuss liberty and sexual exploration with a saccharine, self-congratulatory openness. They’re pretty annoying so it comes as a relief when Lowe begins his solo travels through the picturesque Finnish wilderness. Here, Super 16 film captures the minutia of the landscape: lush moss clinging to rockfaces, water gushing beneath blue ice. Lowe then goes to another extreme during the final third: he plays at a heavy metal concert, where the sense of utopia is created, not found.
While the themes of isolation, alienation, construction and meditation are interesting, the endless silence and indulgently long shots can quickly turn from ponderous to preposterously pretentious, depending on the viewer’s tolerance for abstract articulations of enlightenment.