Ana Lily Amirpour’s first feature, the Iranian Vampire spaghetti western A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, cemented her reputation as one of the best working filmmakers in the United States. It was weird, it was interesting, it was challenging, it was familiar, it was foreign — it was fantastic. So it’s definitely exciting to be writing about the trailer for her new film, The Bad Batch, which dropped this week.
And holy crap, is it awesome.
Quoth the provided synopsis: “The Bad Batch follows Arlen (Waterhouse) as she is unceremoniously dumped in a Texas wasteland fenced off from civilized society. While trying to orient her unforgiving environment, she is captured by a savage band of cannibals and quickly realizes she’ll have to fight her way through her new reality. As Arlen adjusts to life in ‘the bad batch’ she discovers that being good or bad mostly depends on who you’re standing next to.”
Amirpour has also described the plot as “a muscled cannibal breaks the rule ‘don’t play with your food,” which is one hell of a logline. The aesthetics are are point — enough postapocalyptic trappings to make it genre-identifiable, but enough of her old style to make it feel fresh and wild. The actors, too, are perfectly placed in the environment: Jason Momoa’s weirdly cool and sexy, Keanu Reeves is best served when he’s spouting nonsense and looking like a badass, and Jim Carrey’s pushing around a bunch of trash aping the dude with the little helicopter in The Road Warrior.
What more do you want from a trailer?
Anyhoo, Amirpour is one of our most exciting filmmakers, and it’s absolutely wonderful that we’ll be able to see more of her work come June 23, when The Bad Batch hits theaters nationwide.