An early draft of this review was originally published on April 11, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
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Apparently, New York Times film critic Jeannette Catsoulis finds the whimsical new adventure movie Riddle of Fire too drawn out, too tedious. “Viewers may need the patience of Job to remain in their seats.”
Similarly, Michael Sicinski, one of the film critics I respect so highly that I check his Letterboxd account routinely just to see what recent notes he’s made, recently posted this—and only this—about Riddle of Fire: “There’s nothing wrong with this, and it’s actually pretty clever for what it is. The tone just clashes with my sensibility, so I pulled the plug. Your mileage may vary.”
Whew — that’s not encouraging. If I’d seen those responses before I saw writer-director Weston Razooli’s debut feature film, I might have skipped it altogether.
For the record, I’m so glad I didn’t. I haven’t had more fun at the movies in 2024 so far than I had watching Riddle of Fire — first, with a vocally appreciative audience who were right on its strangely specific wavelength, and a second time with Anne, who couldn’t wait to recommend it to friends and family. It’s one of those movies that makes me pause and wonder what kind of movies I might have made if I’d followed that passion. One possible timeline has me striving to bring stuff like this — low-budget, high-ambition films infused with childlike inspiration — to the big screen.
And that is probably because it’s made in a spirit that reminds me so much of the joy, the improvisational resourcefulness, and the rough edges of making movies with friends in the ’80s and early ’90s, running around with clunky shoulder-mounted video cameras, and then laughing in a mix of embarrassment and amazement at our VHS tape “dailies” (which were almost always single-take attempts). But that is not because of any failing on the filmmakers’ part. I suspect that disgruntled viewers are suffering a failure of imagination. Or maybe they just missed out on specific experiences that make this movie such a particular joy.
Just as a simple synopsis of Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride could never convey its distinctive tone, its tongue-in-cheek humor, its playfulness with low-budget constraints, or its childlike whimsy, so a plot summary of Riddle of Fire is going to leave readers clueless about what makes the movie special. Suffice it to say that the story is about…
- motorbiking brothers Hazel (Charlie Stover) and Jodie (Skyler Peters)
- and their girl-next-door friend Alice (Phoebe Ferro)
- who are all desperate to make a very particular blueberry pie for the boys’ sick mother Julie (Danielle Hoetmer),
- so they can convince her to give them the TV’s parental-lock password
- and grant then access to the hottest new video game,
- which they’ve just stolen from a warehouse —
- but they need special ingredients to make that pie,
- including a speckled egg,
- and the last speckled egg in town has been taken by a grown-man bully (Charles Halford),
- and in tracking that grown-man bully around backroads of small-town Wyoming to recover the egg it for themselves, they discover a witch/taxidermist (Lio Tipton, who I recognized from Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress) who controls not only the bully but other lunkheaded crooks,
- and they also befriend a “forest fairy” (who may just be an imaginative mischief-maker) named Petal Hollyhock (Lorelei Olivia Mote),
- and this leads to lots of frightful hijinks in the forest after dark.
Does this sound boring to you?
I hope not. Maybe you’re intrigued — I certainly was — by what sounds like a storyline made up by a fourteen-year-old. And if you find it enchanting, I suspect that you and I would get along well. This kind of kids’ storytelling is, indeed, very much my jam.
But again — it’s not just the plot’s hodge-podge of fairy tales or its video-game-task-oriented outline that holds my attention. What I love best about this, and what makes its amusingly preposterous storyline work, is the How of the movie.
Riddle of Fire is a movie that looks like it was made by the same kids who are the focus of the narrative — if those kids had only late-’80s filmmaking equipment available to them, and if one or two of them behind the camera had the ambition and the energy of The Fabelmans’ young Sammy Fabelman (that is, the young Steven Spielberg). If I were working in Hollywood and somebody handed me this tape, I’d call for a meeting with the kids who made it. I’d consider having them helm a reboot of The Goonies.
But it’s not as amateurish as I’m making it sound. There’s some real moviemaking going on here — moviemaking by grownups who know what they’re doing and have baked exactly the kind of pie from scratch that they intended to. Riddle of Fire may have been somewhat inspired by Stand By Me or The Goonies, but I think it’s something new; there is no Hollywood polish to any of Razooli’s work here.
The 16mm Kodak film stock, the fantasy videogame synthesizer score, the rural Wyoming landscapes (shot as if they’re a fantasy world of colors either muted and saturated by Jake L. Mitchell), the fantasy-film font that provides helpful subtitles to the softspoken Jodie (and only Jodie!) — every rough edge, every scratched lens, every unlikely exchange, every curse word dropped by a second-grader — it’s all evidence of the artists’ love for their vision, for who they once were, and for what they once loved when they were kids. You can feel that they’re giving themselves a gift — a movie no studio could have conjured for them. Razooli tells Fimdaze that the movie is made of “all my favorite things as a kid growing up in Utah.” He elaborates on what those are: “Everything you see in the movie. …. Dirt biking, paintballing, playing in the mountains, fly fishing, spying.”
The cameras treat the children like movie stars even though the kids are just being as awkward and impulsive and silly as little kids really are. It feels like a home movie — albeit an extraordinary one — that someone discovered on a dusty VHS tape in an attic (except for the fact that these kids have some uniquely fantastical smartphones that come in handy when they’re spying). And if you are old enough to remember using shoulder-mount video cameras or primitive “handicams” to make shaky fake action movies with your friends, you’ll probably love this.
The best equivalent for the singularity of Razooli’s vision might be Jared Hess’s Napoleon Dynamite, which won the hearts of audiences by making so much of so little. Hess kept things simple, unpredictable, and quirky (I hate that word, but it’s inevitable here), finding most of his comedy in the idiosyncrasies of his distinctive characters. Riddle of Fire does too, and it will — if it gets enough eyeballs on it — become that sort of cult classic. Where Napoleon Dynamite reinvented the John Hughes high school comedy, Riddle of Fire is stirring some spicy Mad Max into its Goonies/Stand By Me stew, even though the kids’ weapons are paintball guns and their adrenalin-boosting drugs are just gummy worms. There’s even a sequence near the end that made me think of the Gary Oldman scene in True Romance, when the children are dragged before a dangerously unstable young man named Chip (Austin Archer) who is playing at being some kind of gangster.
Perhaps the success that found Hess will eventually come to Razooli. That would be fine with me. But then again, come to think of it, while I’ve enjoyed the movies that Hess made after his success with the “Vote for Pedro!” campaign, none of them, not even Nacho Libre, still shine with the singularity that Napoleon Dynamite had, probably because that first film was shaped by its restraints as much as its resources. As Lars von Trier has demonstrated with his documentary The Five Obstructions, when an artist runs into obstacles they might strike sparks that flare up into inspiration. Even as I hope that Razooli gets to make more movies, I hope he doesn’t forget the secrets of this movie’s recipe. Nothing else in theaters in 2024 tastes anything like this. I don’t need first-rate production values in a pie if there’s this much sweetness, spice, and love in the filling.
I’m disappointed that none of this really worked for Sicinski or Catsoulis. Sometimes critics just can’t find a movie’s wavelength. The great Roger Ebert himself complained that characters in Raising Arizona “talk funny.” (He wrote, “They all elevate their dialogue to an arch and artificial level that’s distracting and unconvincing and slows down the progress of the film.”) I suspect that, later in his life, he probably came to accept and even enjoy the Coen brothers’ love for exaggerating accents and for stretching dialects like Laffy Taffy. Here, Catsoulis complains, “The young actors are winsome but inexperienced, too often forced to wrangle improbably precocious turns of phrase.” Frankly, that exact quality is one of the things I love most about the film, and I suspect that’s true of the filmmakers too. It’s exactly why fans are going to find it endlessly quotable.
Now — I feel a nudge to offer a caution: This is a film about elementary-school-aged heroes. And these kids have clearly grown up in contexts that have taught them how to cuss. Be warned! Hard-swearing children!
But if you understand that this is both part of the movie’s comedy and part of its sadness — the film’s most poignant moment comes when the children share the hard fact of their fathers’ absence from their lives — you’ll access another level of this game. Riddle of Fire is about the glory of collaborative imagination among children who need fantasy in order to survive. And that’s a theme I know and love because I’ve lived it.