A Desert Wasteland of Wasted Potential
There’s a fine line between “art film” and “Instagram filter stretched to two hours.” The Bad Batch doesn’t just cross that line—it sets up camp, paints a mural about it, and declares it profound. Ana Lily Amirpour’s follow-up to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was supposed to be a sun-baked dystopian nightmare. Instead, it’s a heatstroke hallucination where plot, pacing, and purpose wander off into the desert and never return.
Yes, it won a Special Jury Prize at Venice, but so did The Shape of Water, and at least that movie had a fish-man with emotional range.
The Bad Batch bills itself as a dystopian thriller. What it actually is: a two-hour music video about cannibals, cult leaders, and Keanu Reeves wearing a silk robe and dispensing philosophical nonsense like a drug-dealing Deepak Chopra.
The Plot (Or, What Little There Is of It)
Our heroine—or more accurately, our perpetually sweaty bystander—is Arlen (Suki Waterhouse), one of America’s “bad batch,” the undesirables dumped in a fenced-off Texas wasteland where cannibalism, dehydration, and pretentious symbolism run rampant. She’s kidnapped within five minutes by a couple of women in a golf cart, because apparently that’s the vehicle of choice for desert predators.
They promptly chop off her arm and leg, which would be horrifying if the movie didn’t shoot it like a Calvin Klein ad. She escapes using a skateboard and gets rescued by Jim Carrey, who appears in the most unexpected cameo since Bill Murray in Zombieland, except this time he’s mute, bearded, and clearly regretting every life choice that led him here.
He drops her off in Comfort, a desert commune that looks like Burning Man run by a Bond villain. It’s led by The Dream (Keanu Reeves), a cultish guru who runs the place like a spa for post-apocalyptic Instagram influencers. He has a harem of pregnant women, a club where everyone dances to EDM, and plumbing—because apparently the apocalypse doesn’t mean you have to compromise on sanitation.
From there, Arlen shoots a random woman, kidnaps a child, hallucinates for twenty minutes, falls in love with a tattooed cannibal named Miami Man (Jason Momoa), and decides she’d rather eat rabbit stew in the desert than live under Keanu Reeves’ utopian sewage system.
If you think that sounds confusing, you’re right. Watching The Bad Batch feels like flipping through a coffee-table book where someone’s glued together Mad Max: Fury Road, Spring Breakers, and The Road, then spilled coconut water all over the pages.
The Characters: All Beauty, No Brains (or Dialogue)
Suki Waterhouse plays Arlen as if she’s perpetually hungover. It’s not entirely her fault—her character spends half the movie missing limbs and the other half missing motivation. Arlen is meant to embody the resilience of humanity, but she mostly embodies someone who’s deeply unimpressed by everything, including her own cannibalism-related trauma.
Jason Momoa, as Miami Man, is the film’s closest thing to a beating heart—and given the setting, that’s saying something. He’s a Cuban cannibal who paints portraits and loves his daughter. It’s almost touching, until you realize his dialogue consists entirely of grunts, flexes, and the occasional growled word like “spaghetti.” He’s basically a shirtless motivational poster with a machete.
Then there’s Keanu Reeves as The Dream, a cult leader with a messiah complex and a pornstache. His big contribution to the movie is uttering lines like, “You can’t enter the dream unless you let the dream enter you,” which sounds deep until you realize it’s just refrigerator magnet wisdom for sociopaths.
And finally, Jim Carrey as The Hermit, a wordless drifter who rescues people from the desert and draws pictures. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t blink, and looks like a man who’s spent too long inside a Dr. Seuss nightmare. It’s the most restrained performance of his career, mostly because he’s clearly conserving his energy to run away from this project.
The Aesthetic: Gorgeous, Empty, and Overbaked
Let’s give credit where it’s due—The Bad Batch looks incredible. Cinematographer Lyle Vincent deserves an award for making a trash apocalypse look like a fashion spread. Every frame is drenched in golds, pinks, and dust, as though the desert were sponsored by Urban Outfitters.
But the beauty is skin-deep. Beneath the neon glow and art-house framing lies the cinematic equivalent of a mirage. Amirpour wants to make a statement about morality, survival, and American decay. What she delivers is two hours of slow-motion existential staring punctuated by EDM drops.
It’s as if she directed the entire movie through a pair of designer sunglasses and said, “Don’t worry about the story—just vibe.”
The Themes: Cannibalism, Capitalism, and Confusion
The Bad Batch wants to be a metaphor for everything—class inequality, immigration, consumerism, identity—but ends up being about nothing. It dabbles in social commentary the way a toddler dabbles in finger paint: enthusiastically, but with catastrophic results.
The cannibals represent the savage side of humanity. The cult leader represents corrupt charisma. The mute drifter represents… I don’t know, postmodern Jesus? By the halfway point, you realize that the film’s deepest philosophical question isn’t “What does it mean to be human?” but “Why am I still watching this?”
Even the title is a misdirect. “The Bad Batch” implies a group. A movement. Something collective. Instead, it’s just one woman limping across the desert, looking hot and confused.
The Pacing: Death by Sunstroke
Clocking in at nearly two hours, The Bad Batch is a film where every scene feels 30 seconds too long. You can practically hear the editor sighing between cuts. Long stretches of silence are supposed to feel meditative, but they mostly feel like the projector broke.
It’s one of those movies where “nothing happens” is both an insult and a plot summary. The soundtrack does a lot of heavy lifting—pulsating synths, ironic pop songs—but even the music eventually feels like it’s begging for caffeine.
The Performances: Famous Faces, Blank Stares
Keanu Reeves, Jason Momoa, Jim Carrey, Giovanni Ribisi—this should have been an eclectic dream cast. Instead, it’s a collection of celebrities who all seem to think they’re in different movies. Reeves thinks he’s in a religious satire, Momoa thinks he’s in Conan the Barbarian, Waterhouse thinks she’s in a silent art film, and Carrey looks like he wandered in from the desert in real life.
Their interactions feel improvised by people communicating solely through dehydration. When the film finally tries to inject emotion—Arlen and Miami Man gazing at each other under the stars, chewing on rabbit—it’s meant to be romantic. It plays more like the bleakest dating app commercial ever filmed.
The Ending: Nothing to Chew On
The film concludes with Arlen, Miami Man, and his daughter sitting by a fire, eating her pet rabbit. The child cries, the parents smile wistfully, and the credits roll.
Is it meant to symbolize rebirth? Acceptance? The cyclical nature of human cruelty? Maybe. Or maybe Amirpour just ran out of things to film and thought, “Screw it—rabbit stew is a metaphor now.”
Either way, the ending leaves you not haunted or enlightened, but hungry—for a better movie.
Final Verdict: Pretty People, Ugly Movie
The Bad Batch is a film that mistakes atmosphere for substance, silence for depth, and boredom for art. It’s beautiful to look at but emotionally hollow—a Pinterest board of apocalypse chic.
Some critics call it a “mood piece.” I call it Mad Max if the engines ran on pretension instead of gasoline.
It’s not a total loss: there’s visual flair, occasional dark humor, and Jason Momoa looking like he walked straight out of a protein powder commercial. But it’s also the cinematic equivalent of being stranded in the desert: hot, endless, and full of mirages that lead nowhere.
Grade: D
Recommended for: People who think “plot” is a bourgeois construct, Keanu Reeves completionists, and anyone who’s ever looked at a cactus and thought, “That should be a metaphor.”
