With the possible exception of Green Room, no sophomore effort to be released this year has as much buzz around it as The Bad Batch. Ana Lily Amirpour's follow-up to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, her remarkable black-and-white vampire-noir, has been whispered about for quite some time, if only for its premise: a love story set in a cannibal apocalypse. The director herself compared the film to El Topo, while the Playlist likened the film to two major tomes of modern international cinema - Southland Tales and Mad Max: Fury Road. The Playlist also has two clips from the film that somehow legitimize all these claims in under five minutes.
The Playlist also has two clips from the film that somehow legitimize all these claims in under five minutes. Highlights include Jason Momoa drinking a can of Jizzy Fizz while watching a gaggle of weightlifters go about their business, and the wild tension of watching Suki Waterhouse's character get captured by a roaming party of what you might have to assume are cannibals. The film just premiered at Venice, where Netflix picked up SVOD rights to the picture, and will also be playing the Toronto International Film Festival in the coming days. There's no word on North American distribution yet, but with performances by Keanu Reeves and Jim Carrey, the film will almost certainly see release later this year or early next year. An
Here's the first two clips from The Bad Batch:
Here's the extended synopsis for The Bad Batch via TIFF:
A girl walks across a cannibal-infested desert at midday.... Ana Lily Amirpour's highly anticipated follow-up to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night feints in the direction of sensationalistic horror — and, be forewarned, blood is spilled and limbs are hacked — but The Bad Batch, like Amirpour's deliciously low-key debut, uses genre as a springboard for high style and social commentary.
The aforementioned girl (Suki Waterhouse) is one of thousands of Americans deemed unacceptable to civilized society. While wandering in her desert exile, she is captured by a community of cannibals. She manages to escape, soon ending up at a very different enclave of outcasts. Our heroine is safe here, but still does not quite feel that she has found her tribe.
On an excursion beyond the gates of her new shelter, she encounters one of her former cannibal captors (Jason Momoa), who ends up requiring her help. But can she do it without one of them getting slaughtered in the human-eat-human world where savagery is considered central to survival?
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.
