Director: SweetHeartist
Writer: SweetHeartist
Cast: Veri Louise, Ciara Carruthers, Remco Grol, Soloman Lasaro, Logan Chitwood
Running time: 5mins
Spelling out the limitations of the wisdom “less is more” in excruciating detail, Project EDEN offers the audience as little as possible in the way of a story, characters, sound and or vision. It is also light on originality, and frankly, effort. Sometimes, less is very much less.
Meandering – somehow a film of five minutes manages to meander – our way through scraps of a music video (I know this as it is noted in the end credits as “Music Video ‘FEEL’ (Visuals) by MOTHERMARY X HERO”), and what appears to be a pro-wrestler posing for a glamour-shoot, a full quarter of the film’s precious run-time is frittered away on contextless posturing. There are some long finger-nails somewhere. There is a wall of flickering candles somewhere else. A moon rises in the night sky. The Wolf (General) [as credited] played by Logan Chitwood flexes moodily. MOTHERMARY [only credited in capitals] mouths some irrelevant lyric from a different project at the camera. Both are billed as ‘stars’ of this film. Neither seem to actually be in the same universe as the characters we end up spending the remaining three minutes with.
When we finally arrive beside a large pond – with faded concept art green screened across the horizon – we meet The Girl (Child of Eden) [as credited] played by Veri Louise and Ciara Carruthers, and The Boy, by Remco Grol and Solomon Lasaro. In a baffling move on the part of ‘writer’ and ‘director’ SweetHeartist, each performer is dubbed over with the most non-descript voice actors available. Perhaps the original audio was damaged by the wind. Perhaps the performers weren’t quite ‘American’ sounding enough.
Whatever the excuse, the end result first of all strikes me as deeply insulting to both Louise and Grol, because considering the abject lack of creativity or weight in the minimal dialogue, there is absolutely no way they could not have played themselves in the post-production ADR. Second, the limp replacement vocals (I don’t know, but I would guess came from somewhere like Cameo) constitute a waste of time and money for the production.
But what seems most galling of all from an audience perspective, is that this is a reminder that someone was thinking about this production at all. SweetHeartist was making conscious choices here – and the things they prioritised for those choices are all trivialities, while the effort they needed to actually make to engage us routinely go begging.
The Girl, the Child of Eden, whatever you want to call her (because SweetHeartist never bothers to introduce her, to explain why she has two names, or what either of them might mean in the context of this story) and The Boy exist as vapid place-holder characters. The converse exclusively in vacant, open-ended statements, and resolve nothing, while corresponding with anything else we see. The conversational equivalent of lorem ipsum repeats for several minutes, a hackneyed allusion to abstract or philosophical filmmaking, cynically delivered as empty fluff.
At no point does SweetHeartist attempt to build them towards something – or make this ever feel like anything more than an effort-free waste of time, stitched together from a hodgepodge of other projects for no discernible reason.
If you have a spare five minutes and have a pressing need to feel personally insulted, watch Project EDEN. If not, avoid.
