Director successfully goes out on a limb
MOVIES: Ana Lily Amirpour hits the sweet spot between atmosphere and exposition with her film, The Bad Batch
Writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour made a splash in 2014 with her excellent feature debut, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, a kind of Iranian-spaghetti-western-vampire-noir-romance. Her newest has a similar mash-up vibe, though with fewer hyphens — picture Mad Max meets Escape From New York, with a side order of cannibalism.
In a dystopian but oddly believable near (very near) future, an open-concept prison has been carved out of the Texas desert, where criminals are free to roam and, it turns out, eat one another. This is where we first meet the young woman played by Suki Waterhouse. We’ll eventually learn that her name is Arlen, but her tattoo identifies her only as Prisoner Number 5040. We never learn her crime.
The first 20 minutes of The Bad Batch are emotionally horrific but cinematically amazing and almost dialogue-free, as Arlen is captured, drugged and disarmed. No, she didn’t have any weapons. She’s dis-armed and dis-legged, too, and spends the rest of the film with a prosthetic to walk on and a single upper limb. And yes, someone in the film jokes that incarceration has cost her an arm and a leg.
Arlen goes looking for Comfort, a town of sorts, walled in by empty shipping containers and run by a local strongman who calls himself The Dream. He is played (of course) by Keanu Reeves, whose chest hair has all migrated to his upper lip. He channels all the mysticism a career in Matrix movies can bestow, saying Matrix-y things like, “Life is the dream. The only dream.”
(The film’s best line comes from Arlen, when she asks: “What if all these things that happened to us happened to us so the next things that are going to happen to us can happen to us?”
Along the way she crosses paths with a little girl (Jayda Fink) and her father (Jason Momoa). The former becomes the target of a kidnapping plot because, well, in prison everything has value to someone, and a little girl can become a great fortune. Or, if all else fails, a snack. The girl has a pet rabbit that will have animal-loving moviegoers clutching their armrests for the duration of the film.
Amirpour’s genius — and she’s honed it even more since her first film — is her ability to find the cinematic sweet spot between atmosphere and exposition. Too much of the first and you risk confusing and then losing your audience; too much of the second and you’ll put them to sleep. In The Bad Batch, information drips out as though through an intravenous transfer, and you become aware of details almost by osmosis.
You’ll notice, for instance, the locals have made their homes out of whatever jetsam has ended up in the desert, including some things that have no purpose being there. Ramshackle dwellings are constructed out of bits of airplanes and even watercraft, while people look for scraps in a medical-waste dump that looks like a zombie apocalypse movie waiting to happen.
As befits a sophomore director, Amirpour has some bigger names in her cast this time, including an almost unrecognizable Jim Carrey. And her soundtrack combines inventive uses of songs everyone knows (All That She Wants by Ace of Base or Culture Club’s Karma Chameleon) with some you may want to get to know better, like the electronic beats of Black Light Smoke or Fifty on Our Foreheads by White Lies, which plays over the end credits, sending you out of Comfort and back to a more comfortable present reality.
Not that you’ll be able to shake the story’s beautifully bleak, dreamlike mood so easily. Like fine-grained desert dust, you may find it has collected in odd corners of your psyche long after the movie ends.