Lunar Sway | BFI Flare 2026
Nick Butler’s coming-of-age story, Lunar Sway, is an exceptionally wacky watch.
Buy us a coffee (or two!), and fuel our work - for £5 a month you can help us keep OBSCURAE’S independence alive.
Lunar Sway is a darkly comic queer coming-of-age film directed by Nick Butler, featuring a young man, Cliff (Noah Parker), who spends his time working as a technician, crafting fluorescent signs. We watch him float through his life, days marked by hookups with his dentist situationship (Douglas Smith) and hilarious interactions with his amusingly useless therapist (Andy Yu) All runs smoothly for Cliff until, one day, at a yard sale held by his adoptive mother (a soap maker by trade, played by Irina Dubova), he meets a woman named Marg (Liza Weil) who introduces herself as his birth mother. It’s an eccentric film, in the most fabulous way.
Lunar Sway is visually pleasing: set in an offbeat desert community named Mooncrest (the town is fictional, but it was filmed in British Columbia), we follow Cliff and Marg as they embark on a surrealistic adventure featuring beautiful scenes of moonlit deserts and neon signs. The chemistry between the two is excellent - I hope to see Noah Parker cast in much more. He plays the directionless yet up-for-anything Cliff with such a natural ease. Liza Weil steals the show, though. Any Gilmore Girls fans will know her as the idiosyncratic Paris Gellar, so it was a treat to see her in a similarly quirky, hilariously odd role.
My only qualm with Lunar Sway is that it lost me at a few points in terms of narrative. The plot isn’t hugely cohesive - it’s often a little confusing and fragmented, but perhaps this lends itself to the surrealistic nature of the film, a la Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. It has many redemptive qualities, though, that don’t relate to its plot - the cinematography is excellent, the funny little town of Mooncrest is the perfect place to house such a bizarre story as Lunar Sway. Visually and narratively, it’s reminiscent of David Lynch’s work - a scene featuring a peculiar energy healer feels as though it could have been pulled straight from Twin Peaks.
Overall, Lunar Sway is an exceptionally wacky watch, funny at points and emotive at others. Though its plot feels disjointed at times, it’s redeemed by its stunning visuals and casting. Noah Parker and Liza Weil triumph in their respective roles - ensuring an utterly believable yet unconventional story.
