She Loved Blossoms More is a surreal film that is as equally weird as can be interesting. Writer-director Yannis Veslemes is adept at capturing a feeling of strangeness in what is essentially an exploration of grief. And yet there is a disconnect the film can’t quite overcome. The sci-fi horror is certainly stylish, with hues ranging from red and green to distorted images — part memory and something else — eerie in their graininess. But for all that the film leans into its weirdness, it holds us at arm’s length in terms of its characters, who are thinly drawn at best, and their emotional journey.
The film follows three brothers (Panos Papadopoulos, Julio Giorgos Katsis, Aris Balis) who have been working on a time machine for years in the hopes to bring their mother (Alexia Kaltsiki) back from death. They use her closet, still full of her clothes and scent, to attempt this feat, though they fail often despite inching ever closer to seeming success. Their work is primarily impeded by their impatient father (Dominique Pinon), who is funding the project, and is giving them a few more days to get it together.
The brothers want the machine to work more than anything, but rather than a straightforward time machine, whatever they send into the closet seems to go to another dimension. Things become even more heightened (and a bit irksome) when Samantha (Sandra Abuelghanam), who is pushed into the closet, is split in half, half here and half in another dimension, forced to spout nonsense she can’t control. The characters repeat that their mother “loved blossoms more than her kids,” though it becomes a tired retread that doesn’t offer much in the way of true development or explanation.
She Loved Blossoms More Takes Too Long To Get To Its Most Interesting Parts
The film is trippy, and will instantly recall concepts that aren’t wholly dissimilar to media like Alice in Wonderland. The acid-trip-like visuals are what carry the film through to the end, though it’s really in its last 15 minutes that things truly get interesting. The buildup to that is long and arduous. The brothers engage with each other, but there’s an undercurrent of self-seriousness that the characters can’t quite shake.
Everything is moody and, when what happens to Samantha shakes things up, the reaction to that is muted and telling. Just like the characters are more obsessed with getting their machine to work, so, too, does the film get caught up in being this surreal delirium that it forgets to focus on much else outside of that. I felt detached from the characters’ story. When their father finally arrives, it provides a chilling understanding to previous questions, but it feels too little, too late.
Veslemes’s exploration of grief is one that never ends, stopping the characters in their tracks, unable to move on as their focus narrows to making their time machine work. The imagery that accompanies this exploration is compelling, unsettling, and brimming with a sense of hallucinatory strangeness that accentuates the story and what it also ultimately lacks.
If anything, She Loved Blossoms More isn’t weird enough, holding out on exploring what’s beyond the time machine, which is the most compelling aspect of the film. It takes its time getting to where it wants to go, sluggishly moving along and hoping that we’re along for the ride. But, much like its characters feel as they toil away at their time machine, the waiting around to get somewhere that is finally worthwhile is, in this instance, too much of a burden to bear.
