Many critics dismissed Ana Lily Amirpour’s The Bad Batch as empty pastiche, but for me it felt honest and original. It’s a movie that only works if you approach it with innocence and try to put yourself in the shoes of the titular group of characters, who have been discarded by society and left to fend for themselves in a dystopian setting. Upon finding herself there, Arlen (a dynamic and convincing Suki Waterhouse) is soon kidnapped and has her arm and leg sawed off by cannibals before managing to escape to a town called Comfort, where she is given the Hobson’s choice of living as the leader’s concubine and bearing his children. She again escapes and carves out her own world.

This is a self-assured and beautiful film, and it works at sustaining feelings of disenfranchisement and despair in a way similar to Italian neorealist films or the grimmest noir. In that sense it’s very classical, but its modern touches—the “rave” at Comfort, the homeless people, the drugs, etc.—are what plant it firmly in the world of young people today who live in social, cultural, and economic wastelands. It touches on great themes and is stylish and cinematic, but it’s also very personal and rich with black humor. I think it’s a masterpiece and that it’s only a matter of time before it’s reevaluated and placed in the canon of great films of our time.





