FUTURE SHOCK
UNDERGODS I Chino Moya’s dystopian debut mixes Brutalism and bedtime stories…
It’s a mash-up of things I had in my heads for years and years,” says Chino Moya, the Spanish-born, British-based director who makes his debut with the fiercely unique Undergods. Think authors George Orwell, Franz Kafka, J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick and John Cheever seasoned with movies like Stalker and Possession and you’re on your way to uncovering the flavour of Moya’s first feature.
Set in an unspecified crumbling European locale, the film is a series of short, fragmentary narratives that weave together (or sometimes don’t). Though a big fan of such ’80s anthology horrors as The Twilight Zone and Creepshow – “I used to rent those movies compulsively” – Moya was also inspired by Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which frequently digressed as its titular character encountered another taleteller on his journey. “I wanted to make the idea of the story within the story,” he says.
At points, a father (Khalid Abdalla) tells his daughter a meandering bedtime yarn, before the narrative spirits us to other settings and setups – a miserablelooking high-rise, a pair of corpse collectors, the abduction of a daughter and a birthday party humiliation among them. Some don’t even end, a deliberate choice “to make the movie feel like it’s just a single journey, rather than a collection of separate stories”.
If anything links these wild tales, it’s feelings of failure, anxiety and dissatisfaction. “Most of these characters are unable to see beyond themselves, and beyond their own problems and their own frustrations… they are incapable of having full empathy with [others].” Relationship failures also play a part, something Moya could sadly relate to. “My marriage imploded while I was making this,” he reveals. “I ended up living the same experiences as the characters of the movie, which was a great irony.”
To create the film’s dystopian look, Moya shot in Tallinn and Belgrade, hunting out concrete Communist buildings (before tinkering in post with CGI). “I love Brutalist architecture,” he notes. “I’ve been obsessed with it for a long time.” Fans of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, specifically the ‘backwards’ chase on the motorway, may even recognise some locales in Undergods. “It was funny… when I saw Tenet, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s our location!’” he laughs. “But that film was a hundred times more expensive!”
As for the cast – including Sex Education’s Tanya Reynolds, Calm With Horses’ Ned Dennehy and Red Road’s Kate Dickie – Moya had one criteria. “The cast needed to have a certain tone.” That “tone”, he admits, is hard to articulate. Some actors were “very Undergods” and some were not. Gravitating towards “people who weren’t so full of themselves”, it’s probably why he never got any trouble from egomaniac thesps. “I didn’t have a single problem with any actors,” he grins. “Not even a hint.” JM
ETA | 17 MAY / UNDERGODS OPENS IN CINEMAS AND ON DIGITAL NEXT MONTH.