Hide Your Smiling Faces

Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life meets Stand by Me in this impressive indie debut, a lyrical, richly atmospheric meditation on the mysteries of youth, death and nature. The fragment of a plot has two brothers, nine-year-old Ryan Jones and 14-year-old Nathan Varnson, coming to terms with the somewhat mysterious death of one of Jones's friends, whose body has been found at the foot of a local bridge. Set and shot in the densely forested landscape of Sussex County, New Jersey, where writer/director Daniel Patrick Carbone grew up, the film's tone is disjointed and gently meandering, with the thrum of an unspecified threat lurking somewhere in the background. It's a snapshot of a secret world in which the youngsters are as much part of the natural landscape as the rest of the local fauna. Carbone may lay on the death imagery a little thickly on occasion, and its languid pace won't be for everyone, but the lush, damp countryside is beautifully shot, it's naturalistically played by its young cast and the score is spare and haunting.