A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was one of our favorite debuts of its respective year, an impeccably photographed vampire tale that brought new blood to the subgenre. fter a fall festival premiere at Venice, followed by a stop at TIFF, Ana Lily Amirpour‘s follow-up The Bad Batch is now finally arriving this summer. With a cast featuring Jason Momoa, Jim Carrey, Keanu Reeves, Suki Waterhouse, Diego Luna, and Giovanni Ribisi, distribution shifted to the newly minted Neon and now they’ve launched the wild first trailer for the dystopic cannibal western.
We said in our review, “Ana Lily Amirpour’s second feature shoots for Harmony Korine meets Mad Max and would have nearly almost hit the mark were it not for the gratingly aloof attitude and the swaths of directorial license being taken. The Bad Batch — an ambitious, expansive dystopian sci-fi western which features partying, drugs, and cannibals — might come as music to the ears of diehard fans of films like Spring Breakers and Gummo (a kid doesn’t quite eat spaghetti in a bathtub, but a kid does eat spaghetti after being in a bathtub). However, beneath its dazzlingly hip surface the script and characters leave much to be desired. It’s like taking a trip to Burning Man: a pseudo-spiritual, uniquely punky experience perhaps, but one that’s full of annoying rich kids and ultimately emotionally shallow.”
Check out the new trailer below.
A young girl wanders a savage desert wasteland in a dystopian future United States, in Ana Lily Amirpour’s highly anticipated follow-up to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.
The aforementioned girl is Arlen, (Suki Waterhouse), one of thousands of Americans deemed unacceptable to society, who is unceremoniously dumped into a hostile desert wasteland fenced off from civilized society. While wandering in her desert exile, she is captured by a savage band of cannibals and quickly realizes she’ll have to fight for her very existence in this human-eat-human world. With electrifying visuals, a score to die for and a stellar cast, Amirpour has created another cinematic chapter that is as uncategorizable as her first.
Many of the film’s pleasures are in its details, like a boombox-shaped DJ booth and a cannibal camp in an airplane cemetery. But what makes The Bad Batch meaty is the way Amirpour subtly steeps her premise in politics. There’s no mistaking the exclusionary policies of this imagined America for anything less than a cautionary vision of where the real America could go if left unchecked.
The Bad Batch opens on June 23.