The Bad Batch ★★½
A LOVE story set in a community of cannibals in a dystopian future…sounds intriguing, right?.
Unfortunately The Bad Batch doesn’t live up to the hype that accompanied its festival screenings in 2016.
It’s beautiful to look at with a strong central performance, but the story is as empty as the wasteland within which the story unfolds.
This is the second feature film from English director Ana Lily Amirpour, who also wrote the script. I haven’t seen her first, the 2014 vampire western A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, but it has a strong record with critics which suggests many were eager to praise The Bad Batch no matter what.
There is no doubt Amirpour is very skilled, as is her cinematographer Lyle Vincent whose work beautifully depicts the despair of the situation through the desolate landscape and searing heat.
The production design is also of note, particularly the cannibal community’s abandoned air-field and the separate settlement known as Comfort which looks like a futuristic version of the Venice Beach strip with hawkers, musclemen, drifters and a myriad of other characters clinging to the edge of existence.
The film opens with a young woman, Arlen, being processed by guards before being driven into a Texas desert and locked behind a ring-fenced compound. We never truly understand what has happened but it appears criminals, who call themselves The Bad Batch, are now being exiled and left to fend for themselves.
Inside the massive area, which seems to cover many square kilometres, the inhabitants have divided into two distinct communities, based on their physical strength and whether they are prepared to eat human flesh for survival.
Those that don’t, seek refuge behind the walled Comfort which seems to be run by a self-styled guru and purveyor of drugs known as The Dream. This is where our heroine finds herself, following an initial encounter with the cannibals which leaves her minus a couple of limbs.
Despite being generally welcomed at Comfort, the young woman keeps being inexplicably drawn to the wasteland and at one stage takes a gun and heads for the cannibal community seeking revenge.
An encounter with a woman and her child leads to the father, a cannibal, and the young woman forming an unsteady alliance that eventually starts to develop into a difficult, hopeful friendship.
The unspoken scenes between these two characters, Arlen and Miami Man, are the best of the film. Suki waterhouse is on screen for the majority of the running time and gives a well judged portrayal of a woman struggling to understand what the future holds for her.
Jason Mamoa (Khal Drogo from Games of Thrones) is good as Miami Man but nowhere near giving the ‘revelatory’ performance suggested by some critics.
In a poor piece of stunt casting Jim Carrey plays a mute hermit wandering the desert pushing a shopping trolley loaded with his possessions who just seems to pop up at opportune times in the story. Similarly, Giovanni Ribbisi as a drugged-up simpleton wandering Comfort adds nothing.
Despite the relative disappointment of The Bad Batch, I will watch Amirpour’s first film and look forward to her next.