Anima and Animus: The Dark Forest

(2020)

Carly Erin O'Neil in The Dark Forest

The Dark Forest is a ten minute poetic fable by Martin del Carpio, in which he explores the spiritual legacy left to him by his mother and father, in the form of a symbolic fairy tale, set in a forest where a female spirit presides, tending a fire. The string music, full of ominous and sustained anxiety, is by M. Nomized. The cinematography and skillful visual effects are by William Murray.

The voice of “the father” is heard, narrating the film, in sparse and evocative language. “I have met my own mortality,” he says, speaking from the grave. He mourns the repeated failures of his life, in particular his failure to help his older brother, saying that all he has to offer his son is “my disquiet peace…blundering from the inside out.” In so many ways, this is often the legacy that fathers offer their sons. The masculine role demands that fathers shoulder the responsibility to protect and defend and support their families, and this inevitably leads to feelings of failure, inadequacy and entrapment. They want to pass on a positive, nurturing legacy to their sons, but often they can only share their bewilderment and disappointments.

The “mother” figure, by contrast is silent. She ritualistically puts on a wolf mask, invoking totemic animal spirits in the woods. Later, she is transformed into a spider, a symbol of women’s dangerous allure and ability to entrap men. Hers is the realm of symbolic action and magic, not language.

A figure who I interpreted as being “the son” is shown putting personal talismans, a dried flowerhead, a mushroom, into a wooden box carved with magical symbols. Later, the female spirit finds and opens this box in the forest, where the contents seem to hold a special significance for her. Earlier, the father had ordered him to “go find your mother,” and he seems to be trying to bridge their two worlds by sending a message from one to the other in the form of this box.

“Just please don’t dream of my death anymore,” the father pleads. Both of my own parents have appeared to me frequently in dreams since they died, so the suggestion here, that a parent’s spirit feels a restless imprisonment as the child struggles in his dreams with unresolved conflicts, fascinated me. It might represent some growth if a son could progress from dreaming of his father’s death to dreaming of his life.

While the forest setting, with its semi-transparent spirits and animal totems, clearly places the film in the realm of myth and fairy tale, Del Carpio opts to explore his subject through symbolic actions and images rather than through narrative: more of a fairy poem than a fairy tale. He has created a world where he can explore his personal mythos, but this world, where male and female energies compete for our attention and loyalty, has a universal resonance. To borrow a phrase from Joni Mitchell, “there is danger and education” in entering this particular forest. Del Carpio prefaces the film with a quote from Dante, about entering a dark forest “midway upon the journey of our life,” and his film has a lot to say about middle age, a time when many people need to assess how the legacy of their parents has guided their lives, for good or for ill.

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