The Bad Batch: Every Good Director Needs a Messy Second Movie

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Ana Lily Amirpour became a celebrated filmmaker her first time out. Her debut feature, 2014's black-and-white Iranian vampire flick A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, got her more than Sundance buzz—it got her a deal to make a second feature with Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures and Vice. That film, The Bad Batch, hits theaters this weekend. It’s … weird. Keanu Reeves plays a new-age messiah who gives monologues about poop; an unrecognizable Jim Carrey shows up as a hermit who says nothing; Jason Momoa, future Aquaman, features prominently as a cannibal. The dystopian romance ain't, as the saying goes, for everybody.

Not too surprisingly, the movie's critical response has borne that out. Whereas A Girl Walks scored an impressive 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, Amirpour’s follow-up is only currently pulling 45 percent. Some praise its idiosyncratic vision, others decry its lack of coherence or substance. But Jessica Kiang, writing for The Playlist, nailed what might be The Bad Batch’s biggest shortcoming. “The perils,” she writes, “of the broader-canvas follow-up to the sleek and economical indie debut are writ large: This is Difficult Second Album: The Movie.”

The sophomore slump has always been the worst kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Any artist who achieves first-timer success invariably finds themselves hamstrung by a creative paradox: Their second effort gets more resources, sure, but also more scrutiny and expectation—and a lot less anonymity. (That added weight is often compounded for women and artists of color, who are much less likely to get a third or fourth chance.) Some filmmakers use their newfound capital to direct a big blockbuster, though that endeavor can pay off (Gareth Edwards' Godzilla) or flop (Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four) in equal measure. Others, like Amirpour, take the opportunity to indulge their weirdest impulses, like a movie about a young woman wandering the Texas wasteland who falls in with a group of cannibals.

Whatever the outcome, it’s essential that directors like her get to indulge their weirdest cinematic fantasies—even if they’re not for everyone. Indulging strange impulses every so often can prove highly beneficial. After Steven Soderbergh won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for sex, lies, and videotape, he made the literally Kafka-esque film Kafka. It was black-and-white and batty, but a few years later Soderbergh was lining up smart crowd-pleasers like Out of Sight and Ocean’s Eleven. Shane Carruth followed up Primer with Upstream Color. Spike Jonze cranked the meta-volume of Being John Malkovich past 11 with Adaptation; Diablo Cody, who became a critical darling after writing Juno, followed it up with Jennifer’s Body, which turned Megan Fox into a blog-speaking succubus. Not all of these efforts were praised, but they all proved to be turning points that helped their creators figure out where they would ultimately go—visionary or visualist, populist or pop-art. (Amirpour won’t divulge what her next movie is about, at least not concretely: “for as much as Bad Batch let me explore some of the shittiest things about us people, the next one lets me look at some of the better things, some of the things that really inspire me about how good we can be. Sometimes.”)

Amirpour isn't the only director dealing with this phenomenon right now. Just ask Colin Trevorrow, whose Sundance-hit debut Safety Not Guaranteed snared him the director's chair on Jurassic World—and subsequently Star Wars: Episode IX. Last week, his film The Book of Henry hit theaters, and thudded its way to a 23 percent on Rotten Tomatoes; even usually-forgiving Rolling Stone scribe Peter Travers called it a “mess of conflicting ideas.” The fallout was immediate and alarmist, with Vulture even questioning if Henry would put Trevorrow’s Star Wars job in jeopardy.

It wouldn't, obviously, but it still led to some soul-searching for Trevorrow. As the critical takes started rolling in, he did an interview with the Empire Podcast wherein he called the bad reviews “heartbreaking,” but also acknowledged he’s under a microscope now as the guy with his hands on both the Jurassic Park and Star Wars movie franchises. "What I may have underestimated is how my visibility as somebody who is responsible for two things that we all care about deeply, and are massive parts of our public consciousness and shared mythology—how that level of visibility would shine a spotlight that I hadn't considered," he said.

The sophomore slump, then—well, in this case, the junior jag—can be valuable not only for creative catharsis, but for learning how to handle the public’s perception of your work. Richard Kelly still seems haunted by the reaction Southland Tales, his post-apocalyptic follow-up to Donnie Darko received. Neill Blomkamp has said he was put in “a very strange place” by Chappie's poor reception, even though the movie “crystallized or congealed ideas in my head in a good way.”

Amirpour, too, is experiencing that feedback loop—and for her, it goes deeper than audiences not just understanding her movie. During a Q&A at a recent Chicago screening of The Bad Batch, an audience member asked Amirpour what message she was trying to convey by having black characters die gruesome deaths in the film. The director responded, “I don’t make a film to tell you a message.” The exchange, and a series of subsequent Twitter threads, showed Amirpour is still learning how to contend with criticism. “I could have a conversation with people, but if someone’s hurling insults at you, let me just say, at the end of the day, I have feelings. You’re going to call me a racist or something, you think I’m not going to have feelings?” she says when asked about the exchange. “I don’t know what to say other than maybe Twitter is not a good place for me.”

For all of the internet's power to rehabilitate the image of once-overlooked pop culture, it's not so kind to esoteric new releases. Social media acts as an instant funhouse mirror for movies like The Bad Batch or Book of Henry, reflecting multiple versions back to their creators—some kind, some grotesque. Which of those depictions people will remember is based entirely on what their creators do next; to treat early experimentation as failure, though, dooms a movie's legacy before its influence has a chance to manifest.