Wadley

Wadley begins where Jacques Tourneur’s The Curse of the Demon finishes: a railroad that disappears into the night. And out of the depths of this night, springs a fast-paced silhouette. But no demon here, only a young man laden with a cumbersome backpack and eager to leave the town where he has only just arrived. His steps lead us to the end of his journey: a vast and deserted plateau, covered with thorn bushes and cacti, a horizon closed in by a mauve-tinted sierra, an overhanging emerald green sky and huge white mountain-like clouds, far from all civilization. There in the heart of awe-inspiring nature, buried in the ground, tiny and scarcely visible, lies the reason for this journey, a cactus barely larger than a ping-pong ball: peyotl. A second voyage then begins, in the night and on the spot, where the desert’s monotony slowly gives way to a swarming of the infinitesimal, tadpoles at the bottom of a pond, a worm dancing on the back of a hand, vermin devouring the corpse of a decapitated goat, grass swaying in the wind, the barking of coyotes, horses racing, the bloodied blaze of the sky, a night with a full moon shot through by columns of fire, where soul and cosmos fuse in the same passion. Wadley finishes where The Curse of the Demon begins: a misshapen being gesticulates and screams, staggers forward joltingly, surging up from somewhere unknown and spreading chaos as it passes. (Yann Lardeau)