Update: Read our Venice review.
While our review will be arriving shortly, this morning brings the first clips from Ana Lily Amirpour‘s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night follow-up The Bad Batch. With a cast featuring Jason Momoa, Jim Carrey, Keanu Reeves, Suki Waterhouse, Diego Luna, and Giovanni Ribisi, the first clips introduce some of our main characters, including a peculiar weight-lifting troupe and the first glimpse at the hunt.
“It’s a psychedelic western because it’s not set in the Wild West,” Amirpour says. “It’s kind of modern, almost current time, almost calling back to the 90s and 80s in some ways, and 70s even. I think America kind of has that. The weird thing about America is that if you leave the major cities, it’s a big country of just land. And if you leave a major city and drive even for half hour, or two hours, you’re going to end up in some strange towns that are stuck in past decades.”
Check out the clips below and return soon for our review.
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 screens at Venice, TIFF, and Fantastic Fest.