Bad Batch, The
Entry updated 26 January 2026. Tagged: Film.
Film (2016). Annapurna Pictures, VICE Media, Human Stew Factory. Written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour. Cast includes Jim Carrey, Jason Momoa, Keanu Reeves, Suki Waterhouse. 118 minutes. Colour.
In the Near Future, anyone deemed undesirable by the US government is declared to be part of the "bad batch", and exiled to the desert outside what had been Texas, where laws and citizenship no longer apply. Arlen (Waterhouse) is sentenced to exile for unspecified reasons, and quickly captured by a cannibal group living in a region known as The Bridge. They keep their victims alive by cutting off a limb at a time, but Arlen, after losing an arm and a leg, manages to kill one of her captors and escape. A mysterious hermit (Carrey, unrecognizable in a wordless role) finds her and takes her to the settlement of Comfort, where it emerges the leader, known as The Dream (Reeves), keeps the population under control with Drugs and raves.
Despite having a home in Comfort, Arlen heads out into the desert and kills a woman from The Bridge, taking her young daughter back to Comfort. The child's father, a Cuban immigrant named Miami Man (Momoa), who is one of the cannibals, sets out to find her. Wandering in the desert after taking hallucinogens, Arlen meets Miami Man, who threatens to kill her unless she helps him find the child. They wander the desert, but after he kills a man who tries to abduct her, he is himself shot and Arlen taken back to Comfort against her wishes. Miami Man is rescued by The Hermit, who has said the child is at Comfort, and Arlen infiltrates The Dream's harem – populated entirely by gun-wielding pregnant women who make the drugs – which is where the girl is being held. Escaping by holding one of them at gunpoint, Arlen gets the child into the desert, reunites her with Miami Man, and makes the decision to stay with them outside the town, despite the girl's wishes to have the luxuries she got used to at Comfort.
US-Iranian director Amirpour made a splash with her debut, the striking Vampire film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014). Despite winning a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, The Bad Batch met a much more mixed reception. Critics were not slow to point out that the plot is far too thin to carry a two-hour running time, or that the emphasis on stylish visuals, musical soundtrack, and flattened emotional affect, reminiscent of the filmmakers in thrall to MTV aesthetics in the 1980s and 1990s or to the many directors who followed in the wake of Quentin Tarantino, muffles the Political commentary on the brutal treatment of society's undesirables, whether they be criminals, dissidents or illegal immigrants, and on how patterns of power repeat themselves among the dispossessed. However, the depiction of lives eked out on the fringes of society produces many memorable images, and the film is an entertaining addition to the apocalypse-in-the-desert subgenre. [CWa]
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