Edgar Cochran ✝️’s review published on Letterboxd:
"Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it."
-Ephesians 5:25
Love as a perpetual poem, finding its existence through correspondence, not unrequited, but mutually coexistent, and finding its perpetuity through divinity. The auteur brings a divisive collage from the perspective of an admirer's of God's creation, of marriage as a bonding institution of eternal vows and of love as something only Christ can provide.
"He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love."
-1 John 4:8
It is true that great visuals do not necessarily conceive a good story. However, they do conceive a great poem. These are two recognized branches of literature. This montage of wonders, both physical and emotional, is a piece of visual poetry, the cinematic equivalent of writing a poem instead of a book with a straightforward narrative. It is, hence, an idealization of the essay it develops: love as a decision and as a consequence of the transcendental, and its conscious obliteration through infidelity. Complaints regarding that people do not behave like that (e.g. we women do not laugh and dance around and around amidst the fields all the time) are only looking at the superficial structure of a poem, and not its inherent allegorical structure.
Everything is simple. Everything is complicated. Nothing is explained and yet everything is. The premise seems so easy yet the visuals invite to a deeper examination. Word are heard but fade away under the weight of the emotions. A magnificent edifice of human emotional construction, being turned down, being cried upon its remains and being reconstructed again.
Exaggeration means to oversate, but it can also mean to magnify something out of its proportions. That is what poetry does. 95% of the complaints towards poetry point at its exaggeration of things, because it pulls the realism out of the people's minds. That is unreasonable. It is a form of fantasy. To the Wonder is a slice of fantasy set in the real world.
So what do we have between hands? Visual literature and poetry, exaggeration, idealization, divinity, God's creation, fantasy. Time flew by with this film. I felt 80 minutes during 112 minutes. Its only flaw is not being long enough.
"Cristo, acompáñame. Cristo ante mí. Cristo detrás de mí. Cristo en mí. Cristo debajo de mí. Cristo sobre mí. Cristo a mi derecha. Cristo a mi izquierda. CRISTO EN EL CORAZÓN."
85/100