‘She Loved Blossoms More’ Fantastic Fest 2024 Review: Shocking Visuals Can’t Hide a Thin Narrative
The visuals of Greek director and composer Yannis Veslemes’ feature She Loved Blossoms More are so grotesque in their construction while being alluringly ensnaring that they would make fine portraits in an art gallery or exhibit. Unfortunately, a film is more than just bewitching images, and the narrative that connects his nightmare visuals is too thinly conceived and frustratingly opaque. It’s a film that lacks the narrative momentum (and thematic heft) to match its visuals, often feeling split between whether or not it wants to shock you or convict you.
The core premise and themes of She Loved Blossoms More should have been both universal and ethereal to be worthy of the strong illustrations from Veslemes and his team: the film follows three brothers Hedgehog (Panos Papadopoulos), Dummy (Julio Katsis), and Paris (Aris Balis) who are reeling from the death of their mother. Together they’ve assembled a time machine to hopefully bring their mother back to the land of the living. Earnest but amateur, they spend their days testing their machine, which is in the form of a wardrobe (the C.S. Lewis connections don’t stop there), by placing animals (and eventually people) in the machine to see where they go. As is often the case when dealing with technology that can send organic matter into other dimensions, their experiments go awry, leading them all to spiral and lose touch with reality.
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From the start, Veslemes and production designer Elena Vardava reveal their knack for crafting a world and images that burrow themselves into your brain. There’s an inviting scrappiness to the brother’s set-up: it’s all vintage, with the dim lighting of their workspace illuminating the bulky screens and wriggling mass of wires that connect their computers and servers to their transportive wardrobe. Seeing the brother’s work gives the operation a home-grown feel as if to encourage viewers that a visit to their Home Depot means they too can build a time machine to bring back a loved one.
Additionally, the film’s central image, one of a girl, Samantha’s (Sandra Sarafanova) face being split open to reveal golden floral patterns and a blinking eye, is a marvel to behold. While the exact way Samantha gets to such a state is best kept a mystery, it’s eerie the way Veslemes, Vardava, and cinematographer Christos Karamanis work in tandem to make Samantha’s condition feel lived in and tangible: a scene where a brother tries to feed her on one side of the mouth, only for the food to slip into the exposed side of her flesh, is both humorous and terrifying. There are many other technical marvels as the brothers lose touch with reality, a testament to the meticulous care of Veslemes and his team.
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Many of these showstopping scenes are due to the brothers’ drug intake and the consequences of working on the time machine. Drug-induced hallucination montages can be a helpful narrative tool for its characters to access some deeper or universal truth and while the sequences here benefit from the lo-fi, cosmic sci-fi touch courtesy of its premise (you think you’ve seen it all until a vagina-shaped plant claims to be your mother) here, Veslemes and his team seem content to simply show uncanny scenes on screen that don’t harken back to what the film is visually trying to get at.
There’s an admittedly funny and wonky sequence where Hedgehog makes love to his brother’s girlfriend Samantha (Sandra Sarafanova) in a murky and misty pool while he feels up a chicken whose head is missing as it is transported to another dimension. It’s one of many moments that feels like it may be scratching at the surface of something profound about the nature of grief (and the things we throw ourselves to in order to avoid having to think about the finality of someone’s passing). But the presentation is simply too garish to think of anything beyond what we’re seeing.
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“You can’t bring back the dead,” a character emphatically states at one point in the film. She Loved Blossoms More explores how we can understand that mentally, but the void the dead leave is a gulf too deep for us to simply do nothing. There are flashes where Veslemes’ visuals are in lockstep with these themes, such as one moment where the brothers smoke a joint made of flowers growing on their mother’s grave. But otherwise, the director seems overwhelmed by the material, not sure if he wants to offer provocative thrills or a somber meditation. It’s a film that contains multitudes, but in trying to bifurcate the difference between its serious and silly sides, She Loved Blossoms More ultimately ends up being neither here nor there, caught in a state of dimensional limbo.
Summary
‘She Loved Blossoms More’ boasts shocking and gorgeous imagery, but ultimately isn’t really sure what it wants to say.
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