Benh Zeitlin’s fantastical albeit redundant second feature plunges audiences into the adolescent gaze and youthful adventurism evoked in his last film, Beasts of the Southern Wild. Wendy serves as Beasts’ spiritual sequel of sorts and is essentially a rustic, modernist interpretation on the classic Peter Pan stories.

It follows the titular young girl and her ventures into a mythical volcanic island where aging has stopped. There, she is guided by a mysterious young boy with magical powers named Peter (who is, of course, modeled on J.M. Barrie’s creation), and the two embark on a visually awe-inspiring but narratively obscure journey through the island’s wondrous caves and erupting ecosystem. Wendy also encounters the island’s many children inhabitants and, most notably, a giant magical sea creature that Peter calls Mother. If you believe in her, you won’t grow up.

Like Beasts, Wendy evokes familiar themes of childhood anxieties, responsibility, what it means to grow up, and one’s fear of inevitable mortality. And again, all of this is captured through the lens of wide-eyed youth. But Wendy often feels trapped in its own naiveté, unable to move past or transcend the many questions it only begins to explore. The cinematography is unquestionably powerful, with wide sweeping shots of the mountainous terrain. Yet for all its beauty and grandeur, the visuals never quite capture the urgency of the characters’ plights, and oftentimes it’s unclear what the whole journey is about or what’s at stake in the first place.

Scenes jump from one place to the next, in many instances without narrative consistency. In one instance, the young protagonists watch afar on a cliff as they witness their friends being captured by adults on a boat. Then, right after they decide to go rescue them and jump into the waters below to presumably swim to them, we’re in a cave. There, we hear a long musing conversation about something completely irrelevant to the task at hand. Yes, this could all be excused as part of a theme: the specious nature of time and consciousness, in the vein of Terrence Malick, which Wendy resembles with its contemplative voice-overs, but, again, we still don’t know what’s at stake.

This is not to say there aren’t truly heart-warming and powerful moments. The concluding scenes elicit reflections on the rapidity of childhood and the feelings of whimsical curiosity we’ll probably never experience again in adulthood. There are also a lot of Easter egg plot devices that’ll sound the nostalgic alarms for anyone deeply familiar with the Peter Pan stories. I imagine its fans will find much to be occasionally entertained by. For me, the film’s somewhat captivating conclusion just ends up feeling like a sweet cherry on top of an otherwise dull sundae.