It’s going to sound like an insult to immediately focus on its background details, but the low-budget kids’ adventure Riddle of Fire has some of the best set decoration artistry I’ve seen in any modern picture not directed by Wes Anderson.  A large portion of the film is set in the woods, which comes with its own ready-made production value, but the interiors of characters’ living spaces are intensely, wonderfully over-curated.  Whether cataloging a curio cabinet of one witchy mother’s taxidermy projects & Pagan relics or scanning over another, normier mother’s sickbed full of used tissues & plastic medicine bottles, the adult world at the outskirts of Riddle of Fire is crammed with tactile visual information.  It’s a fascinating collection of weird little talismans and the weird little dirtbags who cherish them, conjuring up childhood memories of a time when mundane objects held immense power.  It’s the feeling of bringing home a vintage t-shirt, a futuristic video game, a cool-looking rock; it’s magic practiced through obsessive, personal collection.

This practical magic of collecting just the right assemblage of seemingly mundane objects is central to the text.  The story is set in modern, suburban Wyoming, but it’s structured as a fairy tale quest to acquire a specific list of impossible-to-secure items, achieving legendary hero status once complete.  A small gang of children shoot paintballs & ride dirt bikes around their unimpressive suburb without much outside attention.  Their petty crime spree escalates when they steal a futuristic video game counsel from a poorly guarded warehouse, and they plan to waste away what’s left of their summer eating snacks and smashing controller buttons on the couch.  Only, their mother figure has locked the TV with a parental control to ensure they’ll spend some quality time outside.  They convince her to hand over the password if they bring home a blueberry pie to ease her flu symptoms, which leads them to doing a similar favor for the local baker, then seeking out a speckled egg to bake the pie recipe themselves, and so on.  The list of items gradually leads them astray to the point where they go to war with a Cottage Core death cult in the woods outside town, shooting paintballs at violent felons who pack real guns with real bullets – all in a fairy tale video game quest to bake an epic blueberry pie.

There’s an understated but over-verbalized magic to this film, which is mined for low-key absurdist humor.  The central trio of neighborhood brats announce themselves as The Three Immortal Reptiles, distinguished by the taxidermized reptile feet they wear on novelty necklaces as gang insignia.  When they make unlikely friends with the adult gang’s young daughter figure, she’s announced as Petal Hollyhock, The Princess of the Enchanted Blade, not simply as Petal.  The forest outside town is located at the edge of Faery Castle Mountain, described in-dialogue as “a wolf land of magic & dreams.”  Everything in the script is overly verbose in this way, so that when the kids collect a creepy babydoll to aid in their quest it is consistently described as “a rather chilling, ghastly doll” with no variation.  It’s like watching the rascals from The Florida Project get dropped off on the shores of Roan Inish, with their dialogue getting stuck somewhere between those two worlds.  Between its artful collection of strange objects and the shot-on-film textures of its visual aesthetic, there’s something familiarly magical in every frame of Riddle of Fire, and the dialogue underlines that magic every chance it gets.  Whether the humor of its dissonance between old-world magic and mundane modernity hits you in the right way is all personal bias, but you can’t deny that the magic is right there on the screen; the movie never lets you forget it.

-Brandon Ledet