NEW TO NETFLIX: The Bad Batch and 1922

The Bad Batch

So, I haven't seen Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Midnight; despite its indie-darling appeal it's always been one of those "oh hey, yeah, this one is supposed to be good OH WAIT *insert stupid sci-fi/horror thing I can laugh at here*" movies that sits on the edge of my viewing periphery.  But the trailer for her follow up The Bad Batch was intriguing for a bunch of reasons... I've always been a sucker for postapocalyptic things of all kinds, it had Jason Momoa (Khal Drogo from Game of Thrones) and Keanu Reeves in it, and gosh damn that track is slick.

The film is set in some ostensibly dystopian America where a bleached dry chunk of Texas hinterland has been established as a sort of prison zone where society's unwanted are simply dropped off at the gate and basically left for dead.  Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) a teen blonde whose "F.U." cap pretty much emblemizes her attitude, is barely there for a couple of hours when a couple of locals from a local gang snag her and summarily take an arm and a shin for dinner.

Arlen escapes with anticipated cleverness and brutality and somehow makes her way to a competing town called "Comfort", a sort of permanent Burning Man inhabited by undesirables ruled by a creepy benefactor (Reeves).  A few months pass and an enraged Arlen makes her way back towards the cannibals, finds one in the desert, and shoots her in front of her child Honey (Jayda Fink).  Suddenly somewhat remorseful, our heroine (?) takes the child back to Comfort... not knowing that Honey's father is the supremely badass Miami Man (Momoa).  

I won't summarize much past this other than to say Arlen and Miami Man eventually meet up and it's curiously more affecting than I thought it might have been.  The trailer and the appearance of a "VICE" logo at the film's opening credits made me think The Bad Batch would be more cheeky, maybe overly self-aware of all of its hipster trappings, instead Amirpour plays everything pretty straight and it's quite refreshing.  

That said, it's a difficult film to recommend.  It's not flashy, and there's almost no action, so people expecting something like Mad Max are going to be bored, and at the same time what subtext there is to be found is not really interesting enough to watching it for its social or political implications.  There's statements made about morality and redemption, and a great quote from Arlen about wanting to "be a solution to a problem" but when it was over I felt myself expecting something more.  

1922

This little Netflix production is maybe one of my favourite viewing surprises of the last while, a tense and surprisingly meaningful little ghost story that gets better as it goes along.

It's 1922 on a small farm in Nebraska surrounded by cornfields.  Wilfred and Arlette James (Thomas Jane and Molly Parker) are facing a rapidly dissolving marriage; Arlette, essentially a city girl, wants to sell the farm and move the family to Omaha, a plan the more conservative Wilfred refuses to even acknowledge.  Divorce comes up, things get heated, and Wilfred convinces their son Henry (Dylan Schmid) to kill Arlette and shove her body down the well.

Don't worry about the spoiler, as 1922 is entirely about the consequences of the murder: guilt, regret, despair.  The film becomes a sort of ghost story, but unlike most recent ghostly fare (which admittedly I've avoided for the most part) it focuses on the ostensible villain instead of the usual gaggle of suburban family members.  Sure, there's the usual appearance of gross and scary things, but they're almost inconsequential to what's actually going on in the protagonist's head.

I say "ostensible villain" when referring to Wilfred because 1922 forces us to some degree to sympathize with his plight.  Initially he's something of a monster, coercing his son to hold his own mother down while Wilfred cuts her throat on the marriage bed, then flinging her body casually down the well... but as the misfortunes and anxieties and regrets pile up, it's pretty hard not to feel for him.  

This is obviously a difficult task, and would be impossible if not for a couple of things.  Firstly, Thomas Jane is marvelous, his face craggly and sunburnt, his look perpetually sour and yet at the same time so very much human.  

Secondly, ghost stories often just sort of sit on their own as genre exercises, but 1922 can be read as a sort of elegy for a disappearing way of life.  Wilfred is essentially conservative, rural America personified, a moral man in his own ways, a hard worker who believes in his land and (ironically) his family, who watches his more progressive wife tear that family apart.

It's to the film's credit that it doesn't demonize his beliefs or sympathies.  Watching the farm literally fall apart around him is shockingly tragic, because in our minds we know that a hundred years later (the title is a pretty good marker that we're supposed to correlate the film's events with that of our contemporary reality) the rural American way of life is in steep decline and - for those in the midst of it - it's a truly horrific experience.

I was pretty broken at the end of 1922, emotionally exhausted.  It's not a pleasurable film (even if it's wonderfully shot and paced), but something more powerful, and I think that even people who aren't into horror but like an "interesting" film with some cultural punch will get something out of it.  

It makes me even more curious to read King's novella.  His obvious (and public) liberal leanings are often foregrounded in his works, but typically his conservative characters are over-the-top stereotypes... Wilfred is not one of these at all.