Bad to the Bone: THE BAD BATCH

Ana Lily Amirpour’s second feature, The Bad Batch, is an extension of her cool sense of iconography and obvious love of genre playfulness, as displayed in her 2014 debut, the slick, black-and-white, Iranian vampire movie A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. This new film is a dirty, sweaty, grimy post-apocalyptic western, with grifters and drifters eking out survival in a sun-blasted stretch of desolate Texan desert. It creates a vision of America in tune with these pessimistic and absurd times. In this near-future world, the poor, the sick, the disabled, the undocumented immigrants, and the convicts are tossed without a safety net to live discarded in this wild patch of land known as The Bad Batch. (I wondered if this was just one of many such locales, but the film has too narrow a focus to get into that.) On one side of the desert is a trailer park full of cannibals (among them glowering muscle Jason Momoa). On the other is a town called Comfort, run as a cult of personality by a man (Keanu Reeves, in another of his unusual and mesmerizing roles of late) who preaches from the giant neon boombox in the center of town which houses a DJ. Stuck between them is a pretty blonde (Suki Waterhouse) who quickly pays an arm and a leg for the privilege of sticking around, then stumbles around looking for...something. (There’s also Jim Carrey as a mute homeless man, so weather-beaten as to be nearly unrecognizable.) 

As you can see, this is the sort of movie that sounds like a lot of fun when you hear its eccentricities explained flat out like that, but for all the imagination that went into creating this world – like an appealing low-budget Mad Max prequel vibe run through a Robert Rodriguez emulator – there’s far too little narrative interest. It’s a compelling, visually striking environment. Lyle Vincent’s woozy sun-baked cinematography perfectly cooks the grubby, dirty, displays of dried blood, heat-blasted landfills, and craggy survivor’s peeling complexions. The imagery is so matter-of-factly bizarre that a cult attachment to its dutifully flat-faced oddity is inevitable. But all this creates a movie which never arrives at a reason for being. It’s not fun enough for sick kicks, or smart enough for a trenchant allegory. It simply rides its grubby cool, coasting to a dead end.

Vampire's Kiss: A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night has a great title. It sadly conjures feelings of isolation, vulnerability, and danger. But in this film, the girl is the danger. You shouldn't be worried for her. You should be scared of her. She’s a vampire, stalking her prey down dark alleys and dim sidewalks, disappearing into the night leaving bloodless corpses behind. That’s hardly new material for the vampire genre to explore. Since the first glimpse of these creatures, stories have gone to the areas between victim and victimizer, between the vulnerable and violent, for inspiration, seduction, and fright. Now we’re at what seems to be the tail end of the most recent vampire fiction fad with Twilight faded, True Blood ended, and no new vamp catching public imagination in a big way. That’s what makes writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut feature so welcome. Like Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive from earlier this year, it finds new angles from which to view these old monsters.

Amirpour sets the action in a fictional Iranian town called Bad City, a small, crumbling place with corners of crime, the better to house victims whose disappearances won’t be too unusual. The setting makes the stuff of typical vampire movies into something both new and old. The vampire (Sheila Vand) slinks through the frame wearing a chador, flowing black fabric that’s at once distinctly culturally specific, and from the right angles looks a lot like a cape. Her garb blends into the black of night, leaving only her pale face’s hollow glow under sporadic street lamps. In one scene she hops on a skateboard and glides down the road, rock music bumping on the soundtrack. It’s eerie and captivating, a melding of classic vampire iconography and modern Iran in one cool art film vibe.

It’s a film of studied cool, a simmering mood coaxed along by its sincere affectations and collection of influences. It’s effective. Shot in handsome, wide black and white framing by cinematographer Lyle Vincent, Amirpour builds a feeling of timelessness. Though it has specificities of both genre and setting, it seems to exist in its own hazy, nightmarish dream space where people move slowly, deliberately, take long silent pauses as they stare off into the middle distance. These moments aren’t quite as evocative as the Jarmusch languor they so clearly suggest, but there’s something elementally appealing and unnerving about the crisp high contrast blacks and grays and the blocking that has the vampire appear suddenly, quietly, deadly, like Nosferatu’s hip multicultural sister. There’s a coolness, and a coldness, but as the film moves slowly through what becomes a rather typical vampire story, it stirs up welcome tension and chill.

As so many vampire stories do, this one involves the creature meeting a human who just might be a potential love interest. He (Arash Marandi) is cool too, driving a Thunderbird, and looking like an Iranian James Dean. He has problems – a sick father (Marshall Manesh), debt to a tattooed drug-dealing pimp (Dominic Rains) – but finds those concerns fading to the background as he’s drawn to this mysterious woman. They meet outside a costume party. He’s dressed as Dracula. That’s good for a dark, dry laugh. Their relationship is a slow and subtly developed as the rest of the film, imbued with more danger than romanticism. Their first night together, she contemplates his neck for an unsettlingly long period of time. The shot holds, she stares, and the tension builds without resolving. Later, the film slips into its end credits on a similar note. She’s captivating, but she’s a danger.

We don’t forget the threat she poses. There are attack scenes throughout, providing doses of trashy horror fun. She seduces her first victim (well, the first we see), slowly pulling his index finger into her mouth, and then biting down. He screams. Blood spurts. He pulls away. She slowly slides the severed digit back out of her mouth, and then gingerly teases his shocked face with it. That’s a great bit of horror imagery, the kind that’s surprising, scary, funny, sinister, and sensual all at once. Other doses of violence aren’t as lurid, but they’re creepy nonetheless in a movie drunk on mood and cool more than anything else. Amirpour is clearly having fun cooking up and sustaining a mood of unrelenting melancholy danger spiked with tremors of seductive connection. It doesn’t add up to much, but the sensation of watching it unfold is tantalizing. It’s a promising debut, a rough-around-the-edges gathering of influences with enough mash-up originality and striking imagery to make a memorable mark.