Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Place of No Words’ on Hulu, a Magical-Realist Drama About a Dying Father and His Young Son

Now streaming on Hulu, The Place of No Words is from filmmaker Mark Webber, a veteran character actor who makes his own small-scale indie films, casting himself and/or friends and family as variations of themselves within fictional stories. This one stars Webber, partner Teresa Palmer and their son Bodhi Palmer, who was three at the time of filming, as a family existing in parallel narratives, one pragmatic and one fantastical, as they deal with a looming personal crisis. It’s either profound or a bummer — or maybe a profound bummer.

THE PLACE OF NO WORDS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Bodhi and Mark are sitting quietly in bed when bang, the scene cuts to rough seas and now they’re Vikings, rowing toward a misty, mountainous shore. They’re dressed in furs and carrying swords as they make an arduous trek across deep-green, treacherous landscapes that even Werner Herzog might find extreme. Now they’re back to being modern-day humans, donning fake-fur costumes and plastic swords as they head to the park, and I thought, Oh no they’re LARPers, but they aren’t, they’re just playing pretend, acting out the scenes of whimsy and adventure Bodhi dreams up in his robust imagination.

So there’s the link between the two storylines. In one, they meet fairies and witches, eat fizzleberries and use terms like freekareekasheekadeeka. In the other, they hang out at home and in the hospital as Mark wrestles with his terminal illness. Mark and Bodhi’s mom, Teresa, lie together in bed as the boy leads them through the toddler-logic of his stories, and I chose to interpret “freekareekasheekadeeka” as the narrative trigger signaling the movie’s editor (also Webber, by the way) to jump to the lush forest and experience things such as farting swamps full of chocolate and a disturbing tar-black goblin. You may interpret otherwise, because there’s plenty of room here to parse metaphors, or maybe just let the nonsense be nonsense. But the melancholy pall is the same in both realities.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Place of No Words is of a very similar mind as J.A. Bayona’s A Monster Calls, about a boy coping with the travails of his mother’s terminal cancer by watching the old tree out back transform into a giant beast that talks to him with Liam Neeson’s voice. It also stirs in bits of Benh Zeitlin-style “magical realism” (Beasts of the Southern Wild, Wendy) and Spike Jonze’s underrated Where the Wild Things Are.

Performance Worth Watching: There are moments in this film when young Bodhi’s unvarnished kid-ness is so true-to-life, you might forget you’re watching a movie. That’s likely what Webber’s aiming for.

Memorable Dialogue: Bodhi: “And then we fell into a poop world.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Webber gets intensely personal here, playing pretend with his family in a movie in which they play pretend, and also casting himself as a version of himself who’s dying. Playing out a fantasy in which you picture yourself on your death bed feels like indulgent navel-gazing, and strikes a maudlin tone that threatens to stifle the playfulness of the fantasy sequences. Structurally, the movie is haphazard by design, following lines of intuition more than traditional narrative; it gets more interesting when the two realities cross over in the third act, generating a surrealist vibe that strikes more ambiguous and provocative chords.

Webber hits on some fundamental truth here — a simple shot of Bodhi resting on his chest as he lies in a hospital bed, father and son comforting each other in their shared pain, is more moving than some of the film’s more overt dramatic overtures. The father-son relationship functions most profoundly in moments like this, and a sequence in which the family trio gambols through the woods with toy zap guns, battling invisible robots. Speaking as a father of a young boy, the situation presented in The Place of No Words feels less emotionally resonant than it is suffocating and depressing. I get what he’s going for — fantasy as a necessary escape from reality, and as a place for father and son to unite as a three-year-old struggles to answer the question as to where his dad will be after he dies. It’s a worthwhile rumination on mortality and fatherhood, but some will deem it a major bummer like I did.

Our Call: STREAM IT — but with reservations. The Place of No Words is substantive and thoughtful, but it’s also far from the most uplifting movie you’ll ever see.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Watch The Place of No Words on Hulu