Dealing with grief is never easy, and it’s sometimes made worse by the attitude of fellow survivors. Yannis Vaslemes’ She Loved Blossoms More is an examination of this strange and sad situation through the lens of psychedelic body horror sci fi weirdness that comes out the other side, well, very strange and very sad.
Hedgehog, Japan, and Dummy are in a bad place. Not only are they dealing with the loss of their mother, but their father, a distant but domineering man, is insisting they build a time machine in order to get her back. While they’ve clearly built something that can send things somewhere, it’s not quite clear if they can achieve their father’s goal. With their father’s patience running out, the three brothers make a not so calculated risk that opens the doors for something surreal and horrific, and they find out the hard way that not only is their machine capable of sending things elsewhere it may be capable of bringing something back.
This film is an absolute mind trip. It starts out weird and just gets weirder and weirder. Think Jean-Pierre Jeunet meets David Cronenberg. The set design is fantastic; the house keeps unfolding with seemingly different and new rooms in every shot. Like the house from the first Hellraiser film, or Polanski’s The Tenant. Even the more normal moments in which the brothers are eating dinner and simply conversing felt surreal and dreamlike.
The performances in this film are joys to watch. Panos Papadopoulos, Julio Katsis, and Aris Balis have a lovely sort of anti-chemistry together as the three brothers trying to build the time machine for their father, bringing to life a vision of siblings who think they love each other and act as if they do but are clearly strangers to each other. None of them seem to have any real affection for one another, and there’s no real sense of camaraderie amongst them. The actors succeed at showing that the task at hand is only being performed because they were told to do so by a man they fear. The always excellent Dominique Pinon as their father Logo is a man who is willing to sacrifice anything to get what he wants, including his sons. One gets the sense that he wants his wife back not because he loves her, but merely because he believes he is being deprived of something. All the actors in this film help create a family that is so utterly fucked that the resulting grotesquery feels almost inevitable given how they interact with each other.
Thematically there’s a touch of Lovecraft to the film as well, not so much in any sort of grotesque tentacle-y creatures but more in the “let ye not fuck around lest ye find out” approach to science that Lovecraft was so fond of. The brothers are clearly messing around with something they don’t understand, oftentimes pushing the limits of laboratory safety merely for curiosity and not for any actual scientific benefit. This ties in with the theme of generational trauma the film brushes up against. It’s obvious that even though they’re all extremely intelligent, they’re not so intelligent or mature enough to understand what they’re dealing with. When their father is finally introduced in person, it’s clear this comes from their relationship (or lack thereof) with him; indeed, they don’t even call him “Dad” or “father” but are instead on a first name basis with him. This distance and isolation from him are mirrored in their distance from one another; none of them seem affectionate or even comfortable in each other’s presence. Their fathers shit attitude towards them has obviously warped them all in some way. He is, after all, asking them to build a time machine to bring their dead mother back for him and isn’t nearly as repulsed as the unintended results as he should be. It’s quite apparent they’re doing what they’re doing only out of some misguided and ingrained sense of familial responsibility, something they don’t understand but only feel they should do because it’s what one is supposed to do. It’s almost like this concept has been forced onto them by years of their father’s bullshit.
Losing someone you love is bad enough. Losing someone you love and being emotionally ill-equipped to process that grief is considerably worse, and that being compounded by the intrusion of an abusive parent is…almost unspeakable. She Loved Blossoms More is a long, deep, surreal look at how that pain can mutate into something that is so much worse than grief and, in the end, lead us to some awful, awful places.
