The Bad Batch (2017)

The Bad Batch deposits Suki Waterhouse's Arlen into a fenced desert where the American government has dumped its undesirables, then removes one of her arms and one of her legs inside the first act. Ana Lily Amirpour shoots the whole thing like a fever dream run through neon, all raves in shipping containers and cannibals in golf carts. It took the Special Jury Prize at Venice, which tells us the jury admired the mood more than the narrative. The mood is genuinely something. The story drifts.

The film's cultural footprint is lighter than its reputation suggests. Amirpour is a woman directing a female amputee survivor, and Keanu Reeves presides over a mansion of pregnant concubines whose labor produces the settlement's drug supply, which invites a reading about patriarchal extraction. The reading stays an invitation. Jason Momoa, Yolonda Ross and Reeves anchor a cast more varied than the genre norm, though the variety arrives as ordinary casting. Miami Man's exile is explained by his status as an illegal immigrant from Cuba, a detail that gestures toward an allegory about who gets declared disposable before the film loses interest in pursuing it. The Dream's drug economy offers a mild jab at exploitation, delivered with a shrug.

What the film declines to do is lecture. It is nearly wordless for long stretches, and its sermonizing amounts to a few lines from Reeves about plumbing and freedom. There is no queer presence, no environmental argument, no celebration of bodily difference despite the prosthetic, and no study of the hermit's silence as anything but a quirk. This is a mood piece with a cult at its center and very little thesis at its edges. We are left with images, and with the faint suspicion that the wasteland was always meant to be looked at, not decoded.