Eight years after his Oscar nomination for best director for the fascinating “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Benh Zeitlin returns with his audacious, if ultimately flawed, picture “Wendy.” His visual sense remains excellent, but the film is marred by a plot that drags on and is not successfully wrapped up.

Wendy (Devin France) lives with her mother and twin brothers Douglas (Gage Naquin) and James (Gavin Naquin) above a restaurant that literally abuts a railroad track in rural Louisiana. As a young child, she sees images of children atop the train.

As Wendy gets older, she creates stories which she illustrates. The concept of growing old and forgetting the dreams and hopes that you had as a child already concern her.

One night she hears a young boy’s laughter atop the train as it stops by their house. She and her two brothers hop the train and meet Peter (Yashua Mack). The train continues on away from their home. When they get to a bridge, Peter throws Wendy off the train into the water. Her brothers follow her and then Peter.

They encounter a rowboat with a young girl in it who rows them along. Eventually they reach a mountainous island with a volcanic plume. Landing, they meet the rest of Peter’s group of youngsters.

Here is where the movie shines. The children play and engage in activities in what seems like an endless idyll of joy. No one worries about their past lives, their parents (if they have any), or chores. Wendy blows some flower petals toward her mother reminding her that Wendy will come home soon.

The sense of magic is evident in that Thomas (Krzysztof Meyn), who disappeared from their town when Wendy was very young, is there and has not aged. Later, when Wendy gets closer to Peter, he shows her Mother, a mysterious creature with a warm glowing aura that lives in the water.

But all is not light. There is an older man with long gray-white hair named Buzzo who occasionally enters their realm before retreating to a barren landscape where Peter warns them not to travel.

They discover an abandoned ship, the Manana. While there, Douglas disappears. Their search for him proves fruitless. Worse, James’ hand starts to age precipitously. James asks Peter to help him, and Peter amputates the hand.

Seeking help, Wendy travels with James to find Buzzo who leads them to a primitive village inhabited by older people. The film gets even darker here as James continues to age and Wendy finds herself in a situation that threatens Mother.

The movie is a complete success, even with the ominous appearance of Buzzo, until the discovery of the ship. From there, the movie’s attempts to embrace its overarching theme, the importance of mother love, of family, and of continuing your dreams and hopes through your children, are thwarted by ineffective storytelling.

The film ends with a montage that seems like a cheap way to summarize the theme. It is almost as if, after spending so much time and money on the early sequences of the film, Zeitlin ran out of money and had to tack on this unsatisfying conclusion.

The montage segues from the real characters that we have been watching, so that there is no sense of closure with those individuals. The preceding scene on the beach is both bizarre and uplifting in a bittersweet way. Frankly I would have preferred that as the finale.

I think too that it is one thing to suspend your beliefs in a magical wonderland like Neverland. But as the picture becomes darker, the effort required to accept incomplete explanations of events becomes harder.

This is a film that does not bother to explain what is going on in a didactic, expository manner. So the viewer has to commit to the experience and be willing to make interpretations of the unfolding story.

But, oh, the beautiful first half of the film! Zeitlin, who qualifies for the term “auteur,” has a true sense for what cinema can convey just with images. His details in rural Louisiana are painstakingly created. The restaurant scenes are filled with subtle details that evoke realism, such as the implied camaraderie of the staff and customers, the clatter of the kitchen, and occasional snippets of dialogue.

In the home above the restaurant, the bedroom would probably be classified as “poor” by many of us. But everything evokes the love that is ever-present between the mother and the kids that she is trying to raise right.

The island scenes in Neverland are breath-taking. From steam shooting out through fissures to the lush landscapes the lens of the camera captures this strange utopia. The visual effects used to depict Mother are first-rate and you could feel the warmth emanating from her.

The costuming requires special mention. It is easy to overlook clothing when it is ordinary and plain. But here the garments add to the sense of magic contrasting with the quotidian or, in the darker scenes, how they represent the decay of the soul.

As for the acting, the children are best when they are children. But It is one thing to have child actors portraying themselves, and it is another to make them speak philosophical truths that sound like they came from a script. Sometimes Mack as Peter seems to be reading his lines instead of acting.

Is this a children’s film? I would have to say no due to the dark nature of the second half. This is a Peter Pan film unlike any other Peter Pan film. At places it will be confusing and frightening to younger children. I doubt that the second act will keep their interest.

That being said, it is interesting that a filmmaker would make a children’s story into a film with child actors that is not for children. This seems clearly to be a dream project that was conceived without a sense of who the final audience would be.

Yet, despite its shortcomings, there is a sense in which film lovers should see the movie, if only to judge the film in each person’s own light.

Three out of five stars

Lost on a mysterious island where aging and time have come unglued, Wendy must fight to save her family, her freedom, and the joyous spirit of youth from the deadly peril of growing up.

Starring: Devin France, Yashua Mack, Gage Naquin, Gavin Naquin, Ahmad Cage, Krzysztof Meyn, Romyri Ross
Directed by: Benh Zeitlin
Screenplay by: Benh Zeitlin, Eliza Zeitlin