“Sorry BLADE RUNNER, but you have been usurped.” So claimed one internet wag after viewing this film at the 2020 Fantasia Film Festival. In truth UNDERGODS, a British made science fiction drama, has little to do with BLADE RUNNER (outside crediting Ridley Scott’s sons Jake and Luke as executive producers), with Andrei Tarkovsky’s STALKER and the filmography of Austria’s Michael Haneke being more evident influences.
“Sorry BLADE RUNNER, but you have been usurped.”
Bleak is the word for a film that opens in a newly constructed, but profoundly drab and off-putting, apartment complex in some unspecified future region. Here an eccentric man named Harry, having (allegedly) locked himself out of his apartment, stays with Ron and Ruth, a nice couple living (supposedly) below him. He quickly seduces Ruth and reduces Ron to a jealous loon, but then Ron learns the building is actually deserted but for he and Ruth.
Correction: moving into the building are a man and his young daughter, to whom the man relates a story we see dramatized. Involved is an elderly merchant whose grown daughter Maria is kidnaped by a shady business rival who believes the merchant has plagiarized his work, in an account the little girl criticizes (quite accurately) as “a boring story.”
But then things take a turn for the wholly unexpected when two garbage men set up and kill the merchant, with their object being to sell his body for meat. This leads to a nightmarish environ where imprisoned men are given numbers and an anniversary lottery, the winner of which gets to leave, is set up. The winner is number 398, a tall fellow who doesn’t speak. Wearing his filthy prison clothes, 398 heads to his old suburban home, where his ex-wife Rachel lives with her new hubbie Dominic, a high ranking soap company executive. This precipitates another love triangle, with 398 getting Rachel involved in a weird religious cult and Dominic losing his mind.
A sense of profound emptiness is the film’s major selling point, as all the interior settings—be they sterile apartments, opulent living rooms, offices or dusty warehouses—are uniformly desolate. Ditto the less prominent exteriors, which include deserted freeways and ugly housing developments, lensed in a variety of Serbian and Estonian locations.
A sense of profound emptiness is the film’s major selling point, as all the interior settings—be they sterile apartments, opulent living rooms, offices or dusty warehouses—are uniformly desolate.
Sudden, and wholly unexpected, deaths are a common occurrence, as are equally sudden viewpoint shifts, denoting an existential atmosphere of catastrophe and impermanence. This doesn’t exactly make for compelling viewing, with entertainment being, it would seem, the farthest thing from writer-director Chino Moya’s mind—although the very 1980s-esque electronic score lends a sense of redeeming quirkiness that could stand to have been taken further. Where Moya goes right is in grounding all this unpleasantness in the complexities of human relationships, the one area in which UNDERGODS can truly be said to usurp BLADE RUNNER.
Vital Statistics
UNDERGODS
British Film Institute
Director: Chino Moya
Producer: Sophie Venner
Screenplay: Chino Moya
Cinematography: David Raedeker
Editing: Walter Fasano, Maya Mafioli, Tommaso Gallone
Cast: Johann Myers, Geza Rohrig, Michael Gould, Hayley Carmichael, Ned Dennehy, Simon Manyonda, Khalid Abdalla, Maddison Whalen, Eric Godon, Jan Bijvoet, Tanya Reynolds, Tadhg Murphy, Lorraine Hilton, Slavko Labovic, Katarina Unt, Douglas Russell, Sam Louwyck, Kate Dickie, Adrian Rawlins, Burn Gorman, Jonathan Case, Tim Plester