Luna
Description
Beguilingly melding the messy drama of interpersonal relations with vividly rendered flights of fantasy and imagination, multi-hyphenate filmmaker Dave McKean’s Luna is a bracingly original work of art. It begins familiarly enough—married couple Grant and Kristina travel to the craggy seashore abode of their art school friend Dean and his younger girlfriend Freya for a weekend visit. Though the reunion begins with waves of bonhomie, a tide of darker emotions (envy, jealousy, grief) swirls underneath. And it’s here that Luna takes a leap into the wondrous. Rather than unfold the increasingly fraught proceedings through dialogic exposition, McKean unleashes a panoply of animated images, nightmarish visions and striking drawings to convey the characters’ emotional and psychological states. Serving in an endless variety of capacities—co-screenwriter, co-editor, musician, animator and director—McKean has crafted a true auteur effort supported by a quartet of actors who undergird the most fantastical moments with earthbound emotional truths. Life itself offers us surreal moments alongside normal day-to-day existence. It’s surprising how rarely cinema depicts this blend, but Luna is a welcome example and, one hopes, an inspiration for others to come. —Rod Armstrong
In addition to writing and directing films, Dave McKean is an English illustrator, photographer, comic book artist, graphic designer and musician. He created the cover art for Neil Gaiman’s celebrated series The Sandman and collaborated with him again on the film MirrorMask (2005). He wrote and drew the ambitious graphic novel Cages between 1990 and 1996 and has published several volumes of photography. Speaking about Luna he says, “I like to try and find different story shapes, and the fantasy only really works for me if it shines a light on or magnifies or allows you to see something very real, in the real world, and you get to understand it in a slightly different way.”
Trailer
//player.vimeo.com/video/122129420?autoplay=1Film Details
Language English
Year 2014
Premiere US
Runtime 104
Country UK
Director Dave McKean
Producer Simon Moorhead
Writer Dave McKean
Editor Dave McKean, Emily Rosen-Rawlings
Cinematographer Antony Shearn, Luke Bryant
Music Iain Ballamy, Dave McKean, Ashley Slater, Dhafer Youssef
Cast Ben Daniels, Dervla Kirwan, Stephanie Leonidas, Michael Maloney