Ana Lily Amirpour brought a cannibal love story starring Jim Carrey and Keanu Reeves to the Venice Film Festival yesterday with Bad Batch.
The hotly anticipated follow-up to Amirpour’s Iranian vampire western A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) tells the tale of a young girl who wanders a desert wasteland in a futuristic United States.
The film stars Britain’s Suki Waterhouse (of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), as Arlen, a misfit who is cast out into the desert, where she is captured by a community of cannibals and eaten bit by bit, kept alive to ensure her flesh stays fresh as one by one her limbs get the chop.
Salvation not only from the cooking pot but the nightmarish society may lie with cannibal Miami Man (Jason Momoa of Game of Thrones fame), whose child Miel (Jayda Fink) Arlen takes under her wing.
US stars Keanu Reeves and Jim Carrey have smaller but key roles as a commune leader and hermit in the story, which critics read as a cautionary tale for today’s American society.
“At a time when presidential candidate Donald Trump is advocating the construction of a physical wall to protect the national purity of the American population”, the story of exiling undesirables to a fenced-off wasteland “doesn’t sound all that dystopian”, Variety magazine said.
Amirpour told the world’s oldest film festival, where the flick is in competition for the prized Golden Lion, that the “action-adventure fairytale” was “a love letter” to America.
She said she had been influenced by Robert Zemeckis’s 1984 action adventure Romancing the Stone, as well as the Westerns she used to watch with her father.
In researching the film, she spent a year getting to know a community of people who live “off the grid” in the desert in California in a place called “Slab City”, and said most of the extras used had been locals.
Former model Waterhouse, 24, said she had been drawn to the role from the very first moment, but playing it had felt “like I was an orange being peeled. I was absolutely terrified and stayed terrified throughout”.
Amirpour said she had had no qualms about presenting slapstick master Carrey, famed for films such as Ace Ventura (1994) and Bruce Almighty (2003), with a non-speaking role as “I feel like in a way he is the hermit”.
“The hermit is so important. He’s the soul, the kindness in this harsh environment” in the film, she said.
“He’s also the homeless man you ignore on every street corner. I feel like it’s the same thing with Carrey: being that famous, no-one really sees who you are,” she added.
Amirpour, who also cited The Neverending Story and Princess Bride as among her influences, said she identifies with all the characters in her blood-splattered offering.
“I’m just trying to figure out who I am. It’s this huge, massive thing, figuring out who you are. You have to constantly strip it back down to its basic elements. You have to devastate your reality and everything you know, how you understand the system that you exist it, to be able to evaluate yourself,” she said.