Written and Directed by Mark Webber
Starring Mark Webber, Bodhi Webber and Teresa Palmer
Running Time: 1 Hour and 35 Minutes

by Ian Hrabe  

The logline of this film--"An innocent question by a little boy sets a family on an imaginative adventure to explore 'Where do we go when we die?'"--is misleading and a bit twee considering how heavy this film gets. While Mark Webber's impetus to make this film may have been his son asking this question, the film explores a different question: How do you prepare a young child for the loss of a parent? It’s a question that lacks any sort of clear answer, and in mining that question Webber has made one of the year’s most intimate and beautiful films.

The Place of No Words's mission isn't immediately clear. The film is essentially a combination of artful home movie and children’s fantasy. Mark Webber (best known for his roles in Storytelling, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Green Room) plays a very slightly fictionalized version of himself in a very slightly fictionalized version of his life. In this reality, he has terminal cancer and is struggling with how to break the news to his young son (played by his actual son Bodhi Palmer). The film cuts between scenes from their homelife to a fantasy world where Webber and his son are cast as vikings on a quest for a mythical place that involves fairies, fart bogs, witches and Jim Henson workshop crafted monsters. Realizing how the fantasy narrative and the homelife narrative intersect is how the film delivers its ultimate emotional wallop.

Mark Webber the director walks a dangerous line between eye-rolling sappiness and philosophical insight. The raw earnestness of The Place of No Words, as well as the casting of his own family and friends, could so easily be overwrought and cloying, and it likely will be for some viewers. I tend to be hyper-attuned for identifying this sort of tweeness and turning my nose up at it, but this film left me absolutely devastated. This is likely because I thought about the big dilemma this film poses a lot a few years ago when I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. It's an incredibly treatable form of cancer, but any cancer diagnosis blows open your whole world and makes you start thinking about a life where your children grow up without you. When some of the cancer cells in my body proved resistant to the radioactive iodine therapy typically used to treat thyroid cancer I psychologically spiraled. In advance of a major neck surgery to remove the resistant cells embedded in my lymph nodes, I got so depressed that I was practically numb to everything. I hadn't received a death sentence as Webber had in the film, but the way Webber depicted felt 100% real. "Why are you sad daddy?" Webber's son asks as he is staring off into space. I felt that so hard that I was no longer able to assess this film on a purely objective level. 

And yet Webber's filmmaking is so subjective, opinions are likely to be across the board depending on how you relate to the subject matter. I thought this was a thoughtful film made with a true independent spirit. It's the kind of filmmaking that is hard to pin down and definitely hard to market to a wide audience, but Webber's voice is one worth hearing and here he has found an artful way to address the Big Questions without coming off as pretentious or overly sentimental. Finding a film you can interface with on such an intimate level is an amazing feeling, and I’d say it’s a big reason why we love movies. We’re always chasing that feeling. Trying to hunt down the next movie in our watchlist that is going to make us feel euphoric or leave us in an absolute emotional ruin. The Place of No Words hit me on both of those extremes, and it’s incredibly comforting knowing that even after watching thousands of movies in your lifetime you can still find something that will catch you totally off guard.

Available to watch in select theaters and on demand.