Undergods review – a visionary dystopian anthology
A riptide of surrealism runs through Chino Moya’s ambitious debut feature, a fantasy suite of tales that don’t so much interlock as butt into one another and blurt out alarming, dreamlike correspondences.
Undergods begins with a prologue set in a filthy, post-apocalyptic landscape of Soviet-style tower blocks, being scavenged by Z (Géza Röhrig) and K (Johann Myers). After dumping another corpse in the back of their truck, K confesses to a recurring dream about a pale-faced man – a “ghost” – haunting an empty apartment, “somewhere far, far away from this dump”. This is Ron (Michael Gould), protagonist of the next story, and apparently the only tenant in a high-spec development in the last stages of completion – could it be one of the post-apocalyptic blocks in better days? He and his wife Ruth (Hayley Carmichael) are surprised when a shifty stranger (Ned Dennehy) turns up at their door claiming to have locked himself out of the 11th floor. Illadvisedly, they make him up a bed.
Next stop, with narration by a latecomer in the condo story, is an unspecified mittel-European metropolis where greedy bigwig Hans (Eric Godon) swindles a wild-haired inventor (with a nod to ETA Hoffman’s The Sandman) and pays the price. All these characters are propelled along on surges of Vangelis-like synth, and it is as if the Spanish-born, UK-based Moya is pointing the way – with the ennui and selfish impulses on show in the sub-stories, and the totalitarian-tinged framing narrative – towards some dark, unifying destiny.
The last story echoes the first. Rachel (Kate Dickie) and Dominic (Adrian Rawlins) find themselves in an awkward ménage à trois when her ex-husband, whom she prefers, returns from the post-apocalyptic realm after 15 years. Orbiting around dysfunctional domesticity and satirical business environments, Moya has a weakness for parody that sometimes bogs the film down and is in tension with a surrealist wanderlust on the hunt for more startling epiphanies. But the grand visuals – almost constructivist at points – serve both purposes very well, and you’ve got to be heartened by the film’s commitment to originality.
• Undergods is released on 17 May in cinemas and on digital platforms.