“The Bad Batch” suggests that it might be better - or at least less delusional - to fend for yourself among people who make no secret about wanting to eat you. A chilling black-and-white vampire film, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was a slow and thinly written film, but. Just a few years ago, Amirpour launched onto the scene with A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. ![]() Comfort may be Edenic - at least compared with the open desert - but it isn’t necessarily a place where you would want to raise a kid.Īfter all, it isn’t real, as the sign says. The Bad Batch is the first American film from Iranian director Ana Lily Amirpour. In addition to presenting her parable about the collapse of society, Amirpour also delivers a kind of postmodern Adam-and-Eve story. How and why Arlen agrees to help him achieve that goal is the main question of the film, at least ostensibly. The plot is largely fueled by Honey’s father (Jason Momoa), a cannibalistic loner known as Miami Man who wants his daughter back. The problem with “The Bad Batch” is that, despite such powerful otherworldly touches, there’s isn’t much narrative conflict, once Arlen escapes to Comfort, where street vendors sell noodles, not human flesh, but where the leader exerts a cultlike supremacy over his subjects. Known as the “bridge people,” these man-eaters capture Arlen and harvest one each of her arms and legs for food.Īfter she escapes to Comfort with the daughter of a woman she has killed in self-defense - a little girl named Honey (Jayda Fink) - the story fast-forwards five months to a time when Arlen is able to hobble around on a prosthetic leg while listening to The Dream expound on his philosophy of governance. The same can’t said for the savages who waylay her on her way to Comfort. ![]() Although the no-man’s-land is populated by the undocumented, the sick, insane, poor, weak and the criminals, the film’s heroine seems pretty well adjusted. It is into Comfort that Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) has wandered, after being cast from civilized society for unknown reasons. The scenario feels sickeningly persuasive, given some of the violent, divisive rhetoric we’re hearing these days. “This isn’t real,” reads a sign in one of the last outposts of human decency, a sanctuary city called Comfort, run by a benevolent despot named The Dream (Keanu Reeves). Set in a dystopian near-future, the universe conjured by her new follow-up, “The Bad Batch” - a wasteland where examples of America’s human garbage struggle to survive in a desert dotted with trash heaps and encampments of cannibals - feels dizzyingly extreme but disturbingly plausible. ![]() As filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour demonstrated with her 2014 debut feature - the Farsi-language feminist vampire fable “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” - she is very good at weirdo world-building.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |