The second trailer for writer and director Ana Lily Amirpour's The Bad Batch further teases the film starring Keanu Reeves and Jason Momoa. When A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night debuted on the independent film scene back in 2014, nobody quite knew what to expect from it. Described as a black and white Iranian vampire film/spaghetti western with punk rock music, it was truly unlike anything else that cinema had seen before. On paper even, it appears to be nothing more than an amalgamation of likes and influences that wouldn't necessarily go together, but then somehow, miraculously, they did. If there was one thing clear leaving A Girl Walks Home at Night then, it was that writer and director Ana Lily Amirpour was a filmmaker to watch out for, and one who had already made a name for herself amongst diehard film buffs.
This year, Amirpour returns to the big screen with her follow up to Girl in The Bad Batch. Starring Momoa, Reeves, Jim Carrey, Giovanni Ribisi, and relative newcomer, Suki Waterhouse, it's described as a psychedelic dystopian love story with cannibals. Just in case someone thought that Amirpour might try to make something a bit more straightforward following her breakout debut.
The first trailer for The Bad Batch did a fairly successful job at selling the strange tonal combinations of The Bad Batch, which similar to Amirpour's first feature, is wholly original and unique. Now, ahead of the film's late June release date, Neon has released the final theatrical trailer for The Bad Batch online today, further selling the romance between Waterhouse and Momoa's characters, in addition to some of the film's more hallucinatory sequences. Check out the new trailer for yourself above.
After premiering at multiple film festivals last year, The Bad Batch wasn't met with quite as much applause as A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, but it has still received enough positive early buzz to build hype in the more educated film buff circles. It also doesn't hurt that The Bad Batch boasts some truly impressive performances from a number of its cast members, including Waterhouse, Reeves, Momoa, and Carrey.
But even more than that, whether The Bad Batch is for as many people as Girl was or not, it only further cements Amirpour as one of the most singular voices of her generation. With only two feature films on her resume so far, that's saying a lot, especially when the continued reliance on franchises and recognizable brand names in Hollywood only continues to strengthen with each new summer, and the chances of an independent film really breaking out onto the mainstream grow increasingly smaller as a result. Now, only time will tell if The Bad Batch deserves to be one of those films or not.
The Bad Batch will be released in theaters on June 23rd.
Source: Neon