Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was a memorable exercise in mood, style and genre, set in the black and white, fantastical and vaguely central Californian Iranian town Bad City, with its parched landscape haunted by a feminist vampire with fantastic taste in music. The director’s next film, The Bad Batch, looks similarly inventive — and similarly invested in the scary beauty of flat desert expanses. (Here, however, rendered in highly saturated tones.) The first trailer for the film, which arrives in theaters on June 23, has been released.
Flavorwire Film Editor Jason Bailey caught a screening of the film at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, where he equated attempts to summarize it with a certain Stefon’s infamous club reviews:
“This movie has everything: cannibalism, amputees, surrealism, bunny rabbits, hallucinogens, motorcycles, a dystopian future, El Topo homages, Keanu Reeves as Jim Jones…”
The film follows a group of people in a cannibalistic post-something-or-other society, banished from the United States and living in a no man’s land beyond Texas. Despite all the human-flesh eating and desert suffering, this is also apparently a love story between a character played by Jason Momoa and Suki Waterhouse. Per the official synopsis, Waterhouse plays Arlen, a woman who’s been “dumped” in the wasteland, and is then captured by cannibals, who thereby eat certain parts of her you’ll note are missing in the trailer; she escapes (with the help of a hermit played by Jim Carrey), enters aforementioned dystopian love narrative with Jason Momoa, and the rest you’ll have to discover, if you dare, in theaters.
Watch the trailer: