“All the trash of my heart…”
This is how writer/director Joe Badon explains his wild mashup of miniseries/movie hybrid, THE WHEEL OF HEAVEN, written with Jason Kruppa. Cohesive even when it seems to directly combat the very idea of cohesion, WHEEL OF HEAVEN is some kind of journey through life and rebirth, growth and the creative wonderland of ideas that is by turns insidious, unsettling, light, angry, and full of joy. To watch this film is to experience something entirely, singularly original.
It feels a bit like flipping through the channels of some late-night MTV/ Adult Swim amalgamation at 2:00 a.m. when your own thoughts are blurred with sleep and the edges of dreams you can’t quite recall. Attempting to describe any actual plot at hand is so nearly impossible it would be more akin to trying to harness and control a creature with too little shape and entirely too many teeth.
Yet there is something going on here. Something that feels as big and important as life, buried in the minutiae of the unusual. To confront it, we can only look at it askance, a series of cold, absurd dishes connected by a complex flavor of truth that bites even as it warms us. WHEEL OF HEAVEN is about choice and destiny, connection and rebirth. There are so many threads at work here, in so many little pocket universes of the mind, they almost defy you to follow them to completion.
Told through a series of interlocking episodes, WHEEL OF HEAVEN follows one woman’s journey of discovery and reclamation of self along a path that is both unique in its depiction and potentially universal in its experience. Kali Russell’s turn as Purity (among others) is electric and engaging, endearing in every form. Vincent Stalba’s Uncle Bobbo is understated and viscerally uncomfortable and goes a long way with selling the horror in a movie where the horror buries itself in a sense of nostalgia. Though he played for laughs with the audience at the 2024 Chattanooga Film Festival in-person screening, there is something about Uncle Bobbo that is so deeply unsettling that staring back into his empty gaze at the camera brings along with it the feeling that he knows all your worst fears — and how to make them reality. By the same token, Mr. Universe (Jeff Pearson) is such a commonly evil character — read: a kind of evil seen out in the world with every passing hour — he feels equal parts mythical and like someone we’ve all been warned away from.
WHEEL OF HEAVEN is many things. Ambitious. Nostalgic. Unusual. Comforting. In some lights, it is even horrifying. It’s one of the festival’s most original, virtually uncategorizable offerings this year, and it is a creative feat that feels like an accomplishment just to have released to some pocket of the world. It will not be for everyone, and it is best experienced without any preconceived ideas of linear, sensical storytelling, but it is also a living, breathing, wriggling love letter to creative collaboration and the power to make our own futures from damning cycles of the past.
WHEEL OF HEAVEN is now playing virtually at the 2024 Chattanooga Film Festival.
Tags: Chattanooga Film Festival, Chattanooga Film Festival 2024, Film Festivals, Jason Kruppa, Jeff Pearson, Joe Badon, Kali Russell, The Wheel of Heaven, Vincent Stalba
No Comments