It takes some stones to give Jim Carrey a nonspeaking role in your modestly budgeted acid/sci-fi western and then make him unrecognizable. “It’s so right, though, and I think he’d probably agree,” says Ana Lily Amirpour, calling the Georgia Straight from Los Angeles. Inside the nightmare world of The Bad Batch, which otherwise looks like a version of Punishment Park gone nuclear, Carrey’s character, the Hermit, is the one person with “an ability to express kindness without expecting anything in return”, as the writer-director puts it.

“And it’s a testament to how deeply emotionally intelligent he is that he totally knew that this character was the soul of the film, the soul of this extremely violent and chaotic world. It had to be someone as dramatically powerful as Jim.”

Opening Friday (June 23), The Bad Batch has a few other interesting challenges in store for the viewer. Amirpour’s film depicts a desolate portion of Texas cordoned off from the rest of society and populated, as another character explains, with anyone not “good enough, smart enough, young enough, healthy enough, wealthy enough, or sane enough” to make it outside. Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) has barely arrived inside this vicious colony of rejects before she loses two of her limbs to homesteading cannibals. Eventually, she’ll find something resembling civil society in Comfort, an ad hoc township that looks like a cross between Bartertown and Burning Man. She’ll also find a measure of security within the gated luxury world of “the Dream” (Keanu Reeves), where Arlen is invited to lounge around with a harem of pregnant women who spend their days cooking up psychedelics for Comfort’s citizens.

Like Jason Momoa’s Miami Man, an artistically inclined, if dangerous flesh eater who taps Arlen to find his infant daughter, the Dream cuts a weirdly ambivalent figure. “He’s living large, but I don’t see him as someone who has malicious intent,” Amirpour says. “I see him as a lion with his pack of lionesses. I don’t really have that kind of plot-driven, antagonistic thing. For me, when I think of the characters, I think each one inside themselves is the antagonist. I feel we’ve become a little bit habituated to movies where, ‘These are the good guys; these are the bad guys; and here’s the hero that’s going to save the world.’ And I just don’t see life that way. That’s not what I see on this planet.”

What Amirpour does see, evidently, is a lot of very cool movies. Heavy on tone and sumptuous visuals (and ultraviolence), The Bad Batch is like a switched-on hybrid of Near Dark, Mad Max, Sergio Leone, and the film Amirpour gave to her cast as homework: Alejandro Jodorowsky’s lysergic western, El Topo. Given the chance, she also gushes about Andrzej Żuławski, David Lynch, Leos Carax, and—rather charmingly—Robert Zemeckis (“Back to the Future in particular”). “I’m taking these things and doing my own weird American inbred Alice in Wonderland, you know?” says the director of 2014’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. “It’s the same way that I think about my closet and my clothes and the shoes that I have. I have a lot of different mismatched things, but I love each one for its own charm. And then somehow I just make the outfit work for me.”

Georgia Straight, June 2017