The explanatory text that opens “The Wanting Mare,” Nicholas Ashe Bateman’s ambitious, epoch-spanning directing debut, informs us that in the city of Whithren, citizens are desperate to escape by booking passage on the once-a-year transport ship that carries wild horses to the wintry promised land of Levithen.
These words, a fantasist’s delight, only barely set the table for what’s to come, a visually enthralling but elliptical and withholding quasi post-apocalyptic drama about three generations of Whithren women who carry with them the burdensome memories of “the world before.”At times, Bateman’s film feels overstuffed and underexplored, an inconclusive rhetorical argument between a director and his lofty intentions.
Otherwise, the Baltimore native announces himself as a top-shelf world-builder-on-a-budget, a painter of luscious digital dreamscapes (and hellscapes).Indeed, Bateman’s effects are the star here, casting such a vivid and immersive spell that they stoke a strong desire to explore Whithren,
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