‘Descendent’
Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
Movies about motherhood driving women round the bend are not rare, so kudos to Peter Cilella for this deep dive into a man wrecked by impending fatherhood.
A security guard in Los Angeles, Sean (Ross Marquand, who played Aaron on “The Walking Dead”) is making some repairs on the roof of the school he’s supposed to be monitoring when he sees a mysterious light moving fast across the night sky. Next thing he knows, he’s bound in what looks like a rubber fishing net and subjected to painful experiments. When he comes to in a hospital, however, his wife, Andrea (Sarah Bolger), tells him he was found unconscious after he fell off the roof.
As his injury — or is it the experiments? — somehow turns him into a kind of artistic savant, Sean unravels. Andrea’s difficult pregnancy was already making him tense before the accident, but now he has visions (hallucinations?) that include flash cuts of creatures with big eyes out of a Margaret Keane painting. Sean has a hard time telling what’s real and what’s imagined, and so do we.
Sharp-eyed viewers will spot that Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are producers here, and there is a clear connection between that pair’s use of sci-fi and horror tropes to explore damaged psyches in such movies as “Something in the Dirt” and what Cilella is exploring — “Descendent” is not so much sci-fi as psy-fi.
‘Beyond the Wasteland’
Not to be confused with a documentary bearing the same title, about fans of the “Mad Max” franchise, Vardan Tozija’s feature takes place in a land very much like the director’s native North Macedonia, but where zombies roam freely. Like the recent “Párvulos: Children of the Apocalypse,” you can tell that “Beyond the Wasteland” is a work by a filmmaker with a singular vision. Both movies make excellent use of music, and in both we look at a blighted world through the eyes of children who must find new ways to grow up.
Young Marko (a particularly good Matej Sivakov) is raised by his stern father (Sasko Kocev) in an isolated forest cabin. The dad teaches his kid how to protect himself from the lumbering, murderous creatures who occasionally appear in the woods. Their life is upended when Marko meets two other survivors, Ana (Kamka Tocinovski) and her son, Miko (Aleksandar Nichovski). The two boys eventually take off on their own so Marko can go look for his long-absent mother, and little by little the film’s world fills in. “Beyond the Wasteland” is mainly concerned with creating a near-fantastical mood that borders on folk horror. The father refers to the zombies as the Evil Ones, Marko identifies with the Leaf-Child from a battered storybook and some people bear marks, as if we were in a medieval tale. The zombie genre is still kicking after all.
‘Escape From the 21st Century’
Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
Viewers who thought that the hectic “Everything Everywhere All at Once” was still too sedate should check out Yang Li’s wild time-travel movie. The mayhem begins with the premise: It only takes a sneeze — OK, and exposure to contaminated water — for three high school friends to travel back and forth between 1999 and 2019, where their teenage minds now are in the bodies of men pushing 40. Oh, and this is taking place on remote Planet K, a doppelgänger of Earth except that a day lasts 12 hours instead of 24 — a scientifically sound explanation for the movie’s super-juiced pace, as any M.I.T. grad student could tell you.
Li then throws everything he can think of onto the screen. “Escape From the 21st Century” is a barrage of fast cuts and freeze frames, live action and animation. Meta commentary abounds, like “Such nonsense!” after we’re informed that after the chubby Paopao (Qixuan Kang) became a muscular adult (Leon Lee), his weight loss sped up Planet K’s rotation. Then there are the changes in the aspect ratio and the inspired music cues, like Joan Baez and Ennio Morricone’s “Here’s to You” during an action scene. Li sneaks in some bittersweet moments about the travails of growing up — just don’t blink or you might miss them.
‘Eternal’
Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
In Ulaa Salim’s film, a newly opened crevasse on the seabed could precipitate climate chaos by altering Earth’s electromagnetic fields, unless it’s somehow filled up by crack scientists working underwater. Don’t be deceived: This is not a disaster flick for fans of hard science-fiction — there is very little about the geophysics behind what’s going on in icy Nordic waters, and the sense of eco-doom is less urgent than diffuse.
Rather, this Danish movie works on both literal and metaphorical levels (think “Arrival”) as a fracture is also running through the life of the main character, Elias (Simon Sears). He is a member of a team going into the depths in a small sub to try to seal the mysterious opening, but what’s really on his mind is his unexpected reunion with his former girlfriend Anita (Nanna Oland Fabricius, known in the music world as Oh Land), now a happily married mother. Elias becomes increasingly troubled by remembrances of their affair as well as by strange visions. The fault line is both a sign of impending doom and a portal into alternate realities as “Eternal” ponders the idea of time: the one running out to repair the fracture and save Earth, the one possibly wasted by not moving on and mulling over what-if scenarios.
‘Love Me’
In movies set way into the future, characters often learn about our vanished civilization via objects or media fragments that are taken out of context. In Sam and Andy Zuchero’s film, a buoy (voiced by Kristen Stewart) bobbing along on the now-empty seas connects with a satellite cruising the similarly desolate skies (Steven Yeun), high above an Earth seemingly free of people. Those two objects appear to be all that remain of humankind, whose heritage is stored in the satellite. The huge stocks of data encompass even the most vapid corners of our doomed civilization, like videos once posted by a couple of vapid influences, Deja and Liam (Stewart and Yeun).
They inspired the buoy (who dubs itself Me) to learn how to construct what might be called a personality, and perhaps truly connect with the satellite (which Me calls Iam) — it helps that the two stars have unlikely chemistry, considering their roles. Me learns the behavior it associates with personhood from Deja and Liam’s staged and edited interactions, which were created to monetize intimacy. So that’s what it means to be human? Under its eccentrically breezy exterior, “Love Me” may well be the most existentially depressing film of the year.
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