History has taught us to approach a great actor’s final screen role with a sense of cautious curiosity, to not expect the last word to necessarily be the best. Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Robin Williams and Gene Kelly have all bowed out with films that it would be kindest to forget or at least not use them as any form of defining statement on careers that have usually and understandably peaked years prior. The death of Carrie Fisher in 2016 left behind an unfinished Star Wars trilogy and sadly denied her the integral role she was expected to play in 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, her appearance in the film cobbled together from unreleased Force Awakens footage.
It remains a sad sting, given how rewarding it had been to see her even around the edges of the first two chapters but a thrill to have her back in front of the widest audience possible, a fittingly grand way to say goodbye to someone whose talents always felt larger than life. But what many of us didn’t know at the time and in the years since is that Fisher’s final role was actually of a far smaller scale in a film that has been stuck in limbo ever since, wrapped just four weeks before her death.
While seeing her once again does carry with it a certain magic aura, it’s sadly not in something that’s even fractionally deserving, a rather limp, confusing little fantasy that could have been left gathering even more dust on the shelf without anyone needing to know. In Wonderwell, Fisher plays a kindly witch living in an Italian forest who lures a 12-year-old girl (newcomer Kiera Milward) into another realm. Various fairytale tropes intertwine including a red apple, some guff about enchanted flowers and an evil villainess played by Rita Ora.
It’s mostly incoherent nonsense, the strained product of being stuck in a seven-year editing suite purgatory, allegedly the result of VFX difficulties and Covid delays, but given how baffling the film is, it feels like it was more down to hard-to-fix script issues. Characters spout batty dialogue about legends and rules we don’t understand, relationships are built on our off-screen assumptions and the plot progresses without reason or logic as if we’re constantly falling asleep and then waking up mid-scene. Blessed with a remote Italian location, first-time film-maker Vlad Marsavin makes an adequate stab at tourism ad director with whatever sense of wonder he’s unable to conjure elsewhere at least lightly gestured to by the undeniable scenery. But the tinny effects and, other than Fisher, even tinnier acting are never not distracting, as unintentionally fun as it might be to see Ora try to construct an entire performance from a string of arch stares.
Wonderwell feels like the kind of dispensable Eurotrash curio one would stumble upon in the dark depths of the Cannes film festival marché alongside some horror about an evil gnome voiced by Robert Englund, and without Fisher’s magnetic presence it’s unlikely we would have ever known about it. She will remain unforgettable, her final film will fade like magic.
Wonderwell is now out in select US cinemas and will soon be available digitally with a UK release to be announced
