THE BAD BATCH: It'll Cost You an Arm and a Leg

It's March, time for Post-Credit Coda's annual tradition of highlighting female directorial voices. The endless sea of dude directors can be disheartening, but diversity means seeking out the voices that you want to hear more of in the world. It's also a surefire way to keep one's perspective from stagnation.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Ana Lily Amirpour
Writer: Ana Lily Amirpour
Cast: Suki Waterhouse, Jason Momoa, Jayda Fink, Keanu Reeves, Jim Carrey, Yolonda Ross
Runtime: 118 mins.
2017

The Bad Batch is the second film by Ana Lily Amirpour, who now bears the distinction of being the first repeat director in this series. Two years ago I reviewed her debut, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, which I absolutely adored. Now that her follow-up is out, we can begin speculating about Amirpour's signature voice. And oh boy, does she have a signature voice.

The heroes of Amirpour's films are compromised women. They are furious avengers, power and fury viciously channeled through femininity and flung back at a world that refuses to accept them as they are. They are like femme fatales, if noir were told from their perspective rather than the detective's. They exist in Bad worlds, blasted worlds, but their steely resolve makes them the baddest of the bad. They move through their environment like wraiths, wreathed in silence. Their world is gorgeously framed, a twisted reflection of their tortured inner life. They rarely speak, instead opting to let violence do the talking. Above all else, they are achingly gorgeous, and blisteringly cool. Every aspect of the film bends around their attitude. The camera slinks through its environment, as if coiled to pounce. The shots stretch on into existential oblivion. These are the hallmarks of an Amirpour film.

Sad to say, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night does every aspect of it better. To be sure, it's not entirely fair to frame the quality of a movie in terms of how it stacks up to the director's previous output, but in this case the comparison is especially enlightening. A Girl Walks and The Bad Batch feature a nearly identical stable of tools and elements, but whereas in Girl they were laser focused, in Batch they are dissonant and distracted. The result is a film with component parts that fill me with elation, yet in any given moment they may wibble wobble between brilliance and wincing cliche.

Even as the center does not hold, Amirpour's acute eye salvages the proceedings. The film, I should mention, is about a wasteland populated with undesirables. More often than not we don't know what they did, or where they come from, but we do know that America doesn't want them anymore. They are the titular bad batch. They fill the desert with menace and melancholy. Some gravitate towards a semblance of civilization, some wander in solitude, and some embrace their designated monstrosity. Our hero Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) is torn between the three, and caroms between the different subcultures seeking purpose.

You could call the film art house schlock. The sleazy subject matter--body horror, cannibalism, revenge--is buffeted by long stretches of ponderous silence. Arlen spends a great deal of the runtime navigating the endless wastes, and the beautifully shot landscape takes on mythic proportions. She is like Sisyphus, enacting a perpetual cycle of unfulfilled desire. Each moment of existential emptiness is made fuller by Amirpour's eclectic scoring, sometimes buoyant, sometimes deflating, sometimes ironic, sometimes so on the nose that it sparkles.

Unfortunately, the hypnotic rhythms of the film do not survive the characters opening their mouths. It turns out Amirpour can direct the hell out of people staring soulfully at banks of sand, but has less facility with spoken language. What exposition there is feels pained and awkward. The worst victim of the dialogue is Waterhouse herself. Her intense, desperate physicality is enrapturing, but every time she delivers a honker of a line with her distracting American accent, it casts the quality of her performance into doubt. Moment to moment Arlen alternates between fierce mystery, and being a bit of a dullard.

It's a shame that the acting and writing aren't all there, because the worldbuilding doesn't slack. Amirpour has a knack for making off-beat choices, and she can put together a hell of a suspense setpiece. The film is worth experiencing for the astounding first act alone, in which the world unfolds before us at a snail's pace--until Amirpour plunks Arlen into a hellish scenario with, by all appearances, no way out. It makes sense that this is the highlight of the film because it foregrounds all of Amirpour's strengths: mood, pacing, tone, imagery. It's a half hour of languageless brutality, and it's a rare director who could better pull off such a trick.

It's hard to recommend The Bad Batch as a whole. In fact I'm guessing more folks will hate it than not. The wildly varying quality is distracting, and its indulgent runtime requires a certain amount of endurance. These drawbacks make me no less excited about Amirpour's budding career, though. She represents so many of my favorite qualities in a filmmaker, and I will always take a stunning mess over a functional mediocrity.

3 / 5  BLOBS