Mom, on the other hand, is etched in clear, bright luminescence, dazzling clear, the center of Phillip's world and its very source of light. No other character sees Pedro quite the way that Phillip does, or talks to Dad on a phone that may or may not exist. Even Phillip's aural reality is a hallucinatory landscape, with recognizable elements recombined and heightened in strange and startling ways. When Mom's car crashes, Phillip's entire world is destroyed. At Pedro's house, inertia takes over and light itself changes.
Colors become muted, less vibrant.
Phillip's room feels claustrophobic - in contrast to the interior of the car, which never felt cramped. Life on the road was Phillip's universe, an infinite space, while Pedro's house is a finite, enclosed space. Mom's retreat is Phillip's expulsion. The interaction between Phillip and Mom is the physiological key to the story. Throughout the film, one of my biggest challenges was to find a way to make the complexities of the mother character understandable.