Australian director Thomas Wilson-White’s The Greenhouse is quietly astounding in its simplicity. A greenhouse shrouded in fog acts as a portal into the past, allowing whoever visits access to their memories as an observer. The mechanics of this greenhouse are never explained, because it does not matter. What matters are the memories that filter through this doorway, the conversations that drift into arguments that drift into regret, and the recognition of relationships that break and bend, forcing us to interrogate ourselves and who we are and who we’ve become. A movie about the way time moves on, sometimes leaving us in the past, and being stuck in the prison of our worst moments creates quicksand out of the ground we walk on. There is an intensely melancholic beauty to The Greenhouse, allowing itself the space to feel gentle as it slowly reveals the maze its been drawing before guiding us through.
On the eve of their widowed mother’s 60th birthday, four siblings recongregate at their childhood home. Beth (Jane Watt) is still trying to process the loss of their other mother, and we get the sense that she’s still seeking closure while processing the grief that has overcome her. She is the sibling that stayed home, even though she had plans of leaving. She feels trapped in place, moving like molasses through life with a detached sense of place. She is the one that discovers the greenhouse, keeping the others out of the loop.
Then we have Raf (Joel Horwood), who is the younger brother who smokes behind his mother’s back and often looks like he’s lost in thought. Ruth (Kirsty Marillier) is the other sister, an actor with a recurring role on a trashy cop procedural. And the final sibling is Drew (Shiv Palekar), who brings his boyfriend home to meet his family even though everyone advised against it. The mother is Ruth (Camilla Ah Kin), who shares similar qualities to Beth in terms of looking slightly detached from her surroundings, but she is able to mask it better.
These characters, outside of Beth and Ruth, are thinly written by design. We don’t learn much about them outside of the very vague basics, and we don’t really know much about them outside of their relationship to Beth. Wilson-White chooses to focus the character intensive narrative on Beth, while he allows the other siblings the space to fill these roles into something that feels authentic to a sibling experience. We learn about who they are based on the arguments that arise and the way they poke at each other’s nerves while still sharing smiles. Learning what Drew’s job is outside of this weekend isn’t important, and it won’t help us understand the kind of brother he is or the kind of son he is. We learn that by seeing him actually be those things. Again, Wilson-White isn’t interested in complicating the narrative with these superfluous screenwriting rules. Instead he focuses his attention on exploring who they are in this very specific moment in time, while with Beth, due the very nature of the premise, he is able to build the story around her confronting her memories by re-experiencing them.
Beth discovers this greenhouse in the forest behind the house because she simply couldn’t sleep, and it was almost like she was being drawn to it. Once she opens the doorway that leads to the past, we get to wander around in what feels like an extension of her mind, as one hallway leads her to one memory, while another memory is hiding around the corner. And all she can do is observe. At first, this observation is enough. She gets to exist in a space where everything is fine. Where her relationship with her best friend didn’t rupture, and where both her mothers were alive, and where she felt closer to her siblings. But the more she visits, the more she’s forced to confront regrets that exist in her subconscious. An argument with Lillian (Rhonda Findleton), her deceased mother, is left hanging in the air. After her past self storms from the room, she tries to apologize but her attempt is futile because she has no control over this world. The memory just lingers. An argument unresolved.
Wilson-White creates this ethereal surrealism out of these moments, filling them with this unnatural light, creating a slightly off-key experience that resembles the way we dream. By juxtaposing the past with the present, he is able to heighten this greenhouse effect through the way the characters are drawn in both settings. There is this intensity in emotion and feeling, whether happy or sad, that feels palpable in this greenhouse, while everything in the real world feels more subdued.
The Greenhouse is haunted by memory and regret, literalizing the ghosts of our past by folding them into our present. Four siblings are forced to confront the fractures in their relationships while a mother has to live without the person she built her life with. Wilson-White creates this maze of grief with a gentle guiding hand, detailing it with the specificities of his own experience growing up with two mothers and four siblings, while understanding the universality of the way we move through time without moving with time. As a debut, The Greenhouse feels revelatory in its acute understanding of the human experience.
