Jason Sondhi

The style of Well Wishes My Love, Your Love is magical and it is misleading to describe the appeal of the film and avoid this core observation. From the Malaysian artist Gabriel Gabriel Garble, the film utilizes an aesthetic that is immediately striking—electrically colored and geometrically designed, it is something that is more and more difficult to uncover in an online world where techniques and trends are shared and iterated upon ceaselessly—true freshness.

However, an overemphasis on style suggests a film carried by it, a selection based on a visual attractiveness that covers up a corresponding lack. That is far from the case though. The visual dynamism of the film is necessary, but not as a cover for some sort of vacancy. Instead, it is a compensating hook that allows otherwise cynical or spectacle-seeking audiences to sink into the sort of gentle, atmospheric, and experiential story that they might otherwise buck against. Garble describes the film as “Eco-Queer” which seems like an odd formulation, but it is worth the effort to parse what they may mean by that in order to arrive at a deeper understanding.

The film is attuned to the sensations of the natural world.

Let’s begin with “eco”. The premise of Well Wishes My Love, Your Love is fairly adequately summed up by the logline. A boy, recovering from a recent tragedy, is visited by a companion who borrows his new prosthetic arm and embarks on an adventure with it for the day. Both the nature of the actions they take with the arm and the reflection of this content in the animation style are meant to evoke a type of unity with nature. The companion’s focus is on the overlooked mundanities of the world: the softness of flower petals, the reactivity of a lilypad to one’s touch, and the receptivity of sand as a medium for drawing. This is echoed in the art style. The dense lines of blocked shapes “ripple” via actions taken in the film evoking the symbiosis of all things. I personally related the particularities of the animation to scientific videos—the colors and permeable lines made it feel like microscopic photography, reminding me of the fundamental sameness of all organic matter at a cellular level.

However, there is something inorganic in these scenes—the arm. Via this understanding, the arc of the film could, in one sense, be interpreted as a magical journey to introduce the inorganic into the world of the organic, to “instruct” the arm in what it must understand to achieve unity with the boy. This idea of courtship towards unity with the natural world is mirrored in the GoPro footage, which is an entreaty to the arm’s owner to emerge from the cocoon of post-trauma.

The film’s approach attempts to defamiliarize the mundane in order to make it fresh and new again.

Equal in that “strange formulation” however is “queer”. On a straightforward level, it is a description of Garble and their journey of inspiration in making the film. A recent piece in It’s Nice That sees Garble reflects on a formative memory in 2018 that lead to the genesis of the film, evocatively describing themself as “undergoing a process of queer unbecoming”. Does Garble see themself in the film as the companion? This straightforward reading is supported, yet I also reach back to an older meaning of “queer” which is “strange”.

Well Wishes My Love, Your Love is often referred to as psychedelic in reviews, but also as having remarkable fidelity to the real world. Which is it? Can it be both? I find that the trippy visuals of the piece, paired with the synthetic aural soundscape (composed by Garble as well) have an interesting effect of not transforming the natural, but ever slightly estranging one from it. “Psychedelic” as a descriptor takes on added emphasis as Well Wishes can be seen as a type of stoner film, but in the best possible sense—not because it is outrageous and funny to one on drugs, but because it, in a small way, replicates some of the notable features of a drug trip in how it skews one’s perception of the world—freeing one to approach the everyday from a fresh perspective and allowing for the possibility of epiphany and revelation.

The result is something that is a marvel. A gentle and empathetic film that is experimental and mundane in regards to its explicit plot, but rich in feeling. Having premiered in 2022 at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, we caught it at this year’s Sundance and are proud to share it with you today. For more from Garble including his acclaimed illustration work for top-tier editorial clients, be sure to follow them on Instagram.