The Bad Batch

Writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour follows up her impressive, multi-layered, feminist, Iranian vampire drama A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) with the post-apocalyptic sci-fi, cannibal exploitation, neo-western The Bad Batch.  Clearly this young filmmaker loves genre cinema and knows how to manipulate it in order to serve her own obsessions. We no longer talk about reels in the age of digital cinema, but if we did, I’d say this movie has the best first reel of any film this year. In the first 20 minutes of The Bad Batch Amirpour sets up a world so palpable we can practically feel the desert heat and smell the rotting flesh.  

Suki Waterhouse plays Arlen, a woman marked as an undesirable by whatever totalitarian state America has become in the unspecified near future of this picture. Arlen, like many of her fellow countrymen designated as “Bad Batch,” is given a numeric tattoo and exiled to a fenced-off desert area just beyond the Texas border. Once there, she acts like a female Clint Eastwood in a Leone-esque landscape, crossing paths with various characters and loosing a couple of limbs in the process. 

While far busier than Amirpour’s debut, The Bad Batch lacks the originality of her A Girl Walks Home. Far more than half of this picture comes off as an inert, repetitive meandering—sequences don’t build upon each other, the various subplots feel disconnected, and the casting of Keanu Reeves seems wrong. Amirpour also might have done better to puts forth the film’s political themes with more subtlety than the way she depicts violence. Still, the sumptuously distressed visuals, striking sound design, and Waterhouse’s commanding screen presence place The Bad Batch in the company of the better midnight movies and grindhouse pictures from which it clearly draws much inspiration.