Before jumping directly into the action, Paul W.S. Anderson’s In the Lost Lands opens with a framing device we’ll return to only at film’s end. The George R. R. Martin adaptation otherwise gives no context whatsoever, and when the plot elements finally reveal themselves it’s near-fablelike, with a powerful Queen despondent that she hasn’t been able to experience the true mysteries of the world. She requests that the witch Grey Alys (played, of course, by Milla Jovovich) grant her powers to transform into a werewolf. Until then the movie is a set of seemingly unstructured action sequences with no narrative information to grasp and nothing to connect to. Things seem to happen purely mechanically––at one point, portions of a fight scene take place telepathically between two characters. But far from being confusing, the effect is entirely thrilling.
This is important, too, because after years of many others delivering generic, overly digestible streaming slop, Paul W.S. Anderson––a director once relentlessly mocked for nearly two decades––now seems to be among the three or four people on the planet who know how to direct an action scene. There is a still plot, even plotting––as Grey Alys goes off on her mission with Dave Bautista’s Boyce, we’re littered with bits and pieces of palace intrigue on the other end, not unlike the director’s own Three Musketeers. But as in that film, it’s just the enclosure around action and adventure: not exactly window dressing or means to an end, but a rigid, constraining world in which these adventurers seek freedom and reprieve.
The external characters are just as trapped, our Queen (Amara Okereke) not having been born royal by blood but being raised from birth to serve as wife to an infirm, elderly King. But this is still just that––an enclosure, the world as a trap. And while silly dialogue abounds in Constantin Werner’s script, there are also wonderful performances by Jovovich and especially Bautista to sell story and, just as crucially, visual style itself. Anderson never really uses his imagery for world-building in the way of, say, Denis Villeneuve or Ridley Scott.
Instead it’s always a bit expressionistic, landscapes becoming suggestive not of the external world but the internal feeling of our leads and emotional tenor of the movie itself. Light, color, and shadow tell this story and what we will be feeling. Lost Lands even hops between genres just to land the right timbre: it’s variously a Western, horror, and sci-fi epic––whichever genre fits the tonality that Anderson seeks to convey.
Sets are dazzling (particularly the Queen’s throne room) and it’s philosophically compelling––not Lost Lands‘ positioning of organized religion as a tool of social control, which now borders on cliché, but in positioning the real mysteries of the universe to be found in the occult. The joy is all in its inspired, sensuous imagery, fantastical and dreamlike. The action scene as poetry, endless poetry in and for a hopeless world.
