[Film Review] Flights of Reverie (2025)

What if evolution wasn’t finished with us? That’s the question at the heart of Flights of Reverie (2025), the feature debut of director Li Wallis. The film sees British ornithologist Jack Hastings (John Dooley) travel to Berlin, which has been gripped by paranoia following several mysterious deaths.

There, he quickly gets ensnared in a struggle between two diametrically opposed groups battling for dominance. On the one hand, a highly suspicious organisation of wildlife traffickers who go by The White Brigade, tasked by the government to collect and dump the bodies of victims. On the other hand, an off-grid (well, off-grid-ish, they do appear to just be living in a park somewhere in Berlin) eco-warrior group known as The Revered, who are determined to stop The White Brigade through any means necessary, even if it means destroying some property in the process. And then, there’s the birdman cult, who may be doing suspicious things with animal bones…

Wallis draws on her backgrounds in humanitarian filmmaking, photography, and fine art painting to build a story that aims to tackle some unfortunately very topical issues. Flights of Reverie certainly starts interesting. In a voice-over, an older Jack Hastings (Gildart Jackson) talks about being drawn to research bird populations on Easter Island. There is something playful about this opening scene – Jackson’s calm, soothing voice combined with Wallis’s use of intertitle drawings lends it the feeling of a Michael Palin documentary. However, this turns out to be a misdirection on Wallis’s part. After we jump back in time to meet younger Hastings as he arrives in Berlin and meets land surveyor Esther (Julie Millaud), the film splinters off into a veritable tangle of subplots, and it becomes increasingly hard to keep track of who’s who within the broader story.

Flights of Reverie is at its best when Wallis fully gives in to her folk horror impulses, blending Panos Cosmatos-style trippy neon visuals with cloaked animal-mask wearing strangers (the previously mentioned birdman cult) and woozy camera work. Unfortunately, this does not happen nearly enough; instead spending too much time introducing more characters and delivering exposition instead of actual dialogue. This robs the characters of any real human connection, leaving the viewer with a lack of real stakes. The film’s attempt at working in a romantic bond between Hastings and Esther falls flat, given that they don’t actually interact all that much. Similarly, we don’t get nearly enough fleshing out of the dynamics between the members of The White Brigade and the members of The Revered.

The question at the film’s core, being the idea that evolution isn’t done with us and that there is an evolutionary step beyond what we know as humans, is certainly an intriguing one. But Flights of Reverie doesn’t seem that interested in working with this question, apart from a few offhand mentions of bird/human gene manipulation. Instead, what we’re left with as the viewer is an ambitious, intriguing, but ultimately deeply flawed film.

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