Debut: ‘Moon’ Comforts and Disturbs in a Post-Lockdown World
Moon, a 5-minute film featuring British rapper Brian Nasty, whose music is used as the soundtrack, is not just a music video. Written and directed by Luke Casey during the height of COVID lockdowns, Moon is part of a larger surrealist series about the state of the world during and after the seismic shift of lockdown.
The collaboration between Casey and Brian Nasty draws from their shared interest in Japanese culture, featuring a demented moon evocative of the Blood Moon in the Legend of Zelda video game. Aesthetically, the film is colorful, eerie, and strange, with vintage color grading and gritty film grain that adds a timeless aspect to a timely and relevant message.
Moon begins by placing viewers in a blue-and-red-lit dining room with empty tables and chairs except for one man, who stares blankly at the table. He wears an ill-fitting suit and a casual hairstyle, seeming out of place but not uncomfortable. A glowing red light from the room’s only window catches his eye. As the man approaches the red glow, the music fades into the background, and the audience hears his slow footsteps. He climbs a ladder to the tiny window, through which viewers see a grotesque, red-eyed moon growling in the sky above a dystopian cityscape.
The moon’s growling, paired with an incessant air horn and fading music, makes viewers uneasy. The liminal space of a strange and empty dining room feels foreboding. Nevertheless, the man walks back to his seat and, still staring intently at the window, calmly eats lychee fruit and sips fluorescent liquid from a stemmed glass. His rote and almost childlike behavior adds to the viewers’ growing unease – despite the chaos outside, he continues to dine and drink, awaiting the end of the world. Slowly, the surreality ramps up. The man walks again to the window, staring out as the moon sizzles and growls and the red flashes and sirens intensify. The moon’s angry and toothy snarl grows larger and larger, but the man is unperturbed. As the room shakes and the moon hurtles towards the viewer, larger and larger in the frame, thick, glittery tears appear on the man’s cheeks.
By minute three, the viewer is fully immersed in a suspension of disbelief, a nail-biting tension – Casey’s use of color, texture, and scale easily draws audiences into this strange apocalyptic world, one where everything is falling apart but nobody seems to care. The vast cityscape and sounds of sirens outside the window suggest a crowded and populated world, but viewers see only one man in an empty room.
Though the scene is far removed from reality, it parallels a sentiment shared by many during the time of the film’s release. Trapped alone and crying as an earth-ruining fire rages just outside his window, the single character is entirely unable to stop the world from burning. Casey’s literal interpretation of “watching the world burn” feels applicable to the real-life social and political climate through which his audience is living. The man’s outwardly unfazed demeanor mirrors the disconnection many feel from the world around them amid metaphorical (and literal) fires.
The marriage of threat and whimsy quickly crosses into absurdity when the moon, once raging and threatening, breaks through the window and lands on the floor, no larger than a soccer ball. As the man leans down to pick it up, the moon’s red eyes give way to watery blue doll eyes and its wrinkled face turns smooth. Now the size of an apple, the moon is charming and unthreatening, almost cute. It begins to mouth the words of the soundtrack, and Brian smiles.
Casey says of Moon,
“[During lockdown], there was a lot of intense news and information I was ingesting through my screen. I wanted Moon to reflect that sense of anxiety a lot of people were feeling but tried to deliver it in a fun and surreal way.”
The final few seconds of Moon tie the film together for an experience that is equal parts terrifying and heartening. The film takes place entirely within the ominous and threatening aesthetic of the dining room, with only glimpses through the window to the burning outside world. What looked from within like a threat – the massive, fiery moon – is reduced to a palm-sized ball when it shatters through the glass. After nearly four minutes of unease, audiences are both relieved and humored by the sight of a glittery, tear-streaked man singing happily along with a tiny clay ball in a creepy dining room.
The protagonist’s detachment is a feeling with which many can identify after three years of unprecedented economic, social, and environmental disaster. By reducing the film’s main antagonist to a fist-sized ball of clay yet never removing or diminishing the threatening nature of its setting, Casey points towards a coping strategy for a new world. Amid the chaos of what feels like an apocalypse, perhaps leaning into its absurd cruelty can provide us with a coping mechanism. To the extent that no individual can douse the fire that seems to consume our world, they can sing and dance along through their tears to live another day.